Print Issue of October 18, 2018 (Volume 48, Number 3) by Chicago Reader

C H I C A G O ’ S F R E E W E E K LY S I N C E 1 9 7 1 | O C T O B E R 1 8 , 2 0 1 8

The Triibe visits Queen Key at home with her cousins 24

THE

LONG DEATH OF JEAN LALIME

A classic tale of Chicago corruption, and also of rabbinical law, frontier justice, and the city’s ﬁrst murder By PAUL DAILING 9

Anya Davidson delivers a comics report from the Women’s March to the Polls 18

THIS WEEK

C H I C AG O R E A D E R | O C TO B E R 1 8 , 2 01 8 | VO LU M E 4 8 , N U M B E R 3

FEATURE

A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

IT JUST FEELS like whiplash most days, doesn’t it? We’ve barely wrapped our heads around how Brett Kavanaugh’s moving soliloquy on drinkin’ won him a seat on the Supreme Court and then Elizabeth Warren takes a seat at the table for President Trump’s weird new birtherism game. It’s sunny and frigid and autumn in Chicago, and Chance the Rapper isn’t running for mayor but maybe should since Toni Preckwinkle’s security chief appears to have abandoned an SUV in a ditch under increasingly mysterious circumstances. What is even happening right now? It’s October. I usually spend the month watching a horror movie a day in the #31HorrorFilms31Days challenge, a project of local boy-gone-horribly-wrong Daniel Kraus (writer of the novel The Shape of Water and the upcoming The Living Dead, cowritten with the late, great George Romero). This year’s different, of course: I spent all my horror-movie-watching time reading this issue’s cover feature on Chicago’s very first murder. The way that recently unearthed details of interpreter and fur trader Jean Lalime’s death forecast a terrifying future for Chicago politics is chilling. (You’ll also see shimmers of it behind Ben Joravsky’s remembrance of the late alderman Bill Henry.) But the issue isn’t all fear-inducing. We’re introducing something new in these pages—a regular comics journalism feature. I’ve been working in the form for the last seven years, and I’m excited to share what I’ve discovered about graphic nonfiction narratives during that time. Local creator Anya Davidson kicks us off with two pages from Saturday’s Women’s March to the Polls called “Raised Voices.” It’s a thoughtful, hilarious, and extremely true peek at very recent and very local events. I hope you love it. We did make some regrettable errors in last week’s issue. An article on the Jeff Awards has been revised and is currently available in an updated form online at chicagoreader.com. Apparently we misspelled “Jastin Timberluk” as well. Certain staff members will happily take him to dinner to personally apologize for the egregious error if he wants to get in touch. Anyway, I’ll be getting my chill fill next week at a Music Box midnight screening of Jennifer’s Body. Look for me in the hand-Sharpied “I’d die for Karyn Kusama” T-shirt and we can high-five about horrors both entertaining and not. —ANNE ELIZABETH MOORE

The bones of Jean Lalime

Chicago’s ﬁrst murder victim has a stunning tale to tell about the corruption, nepotism, and falsehoods that helped shape the city. BY PAUL DAILING 9 MUSIC FEATURE

Raised Voices

Our intrepid comics journalist interviews supporters, detractors, and everyone else at the Women’s March to the Polls in Grant Park. BY ANYA DAVIDSON 18 MUSIC FEATURE

Queen Key’s confidence sends a message to black women

The rapper demands what she wants—and inspires young fans to do the same. BY THE TRIIBE 24

TO CONTACT ANY READER EMPLOYEE, E-MAIL: (FIRST INITIAL)(LAST NAME) @CHICAGOREADER.COM

PUBLISHER TRACY BAIM EDITOR IN CHIEF ANNE ELIZABETH MOORE MANAGING EDITOR, DIGITAL KAREN HAWKINS DEPUTY EDITOR KATE SCHMIDT CREATIVE DIRECTOR VINCE CERASANI DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY JAMIE RAMSAY CULTURE EDITOR AIMEE LEVITT MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO ASSOCIATE EDITOR JAMIE LUDWIG SENIOR WRITERS DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, MIKE SULA SENIOR THEATER CRITIC TONY ADLER STAFF WRITERS MAYA DUKMASOVA, LEOR GALIL SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR RYAN SMITH GRAPHIC DESIGNER SUE KWONG MUSIC LISTINGS COORDINATOR LUCA CIMARUSTI FILM LISTINGS COORDINATOR PATRICK FRIEL CONTRIBUTORS LUCA CIMARUSTI, ANYA DAVIDSON, ISA GIALLORENZO, JOHN GREENFIELD, ANDREA GRONVALL, JUSTIN HAYFORD, JACK HELBIG, IRENE HSIAO, DAN JAKES, MONICA KENDRICK, STEVE KRAKOW, MAX MALLER, BILL MEYER, SCOTT MORROW, J.R. NELSON, MARISSA OBERLANDER, LEAH PICKETT, JAMES PORTER, BEN SACHS, KATHLEEN SACHS, DMITRY SAMAROV, BRIANNA WELLEN, ANNA WHITE, ALBERT WILLIAMS, IZZY YELLEN INTERNS EMMANUEL CAMARILLO, MARISSA DE LA CERDA, JULIA HALE, BRITA HUNEGS, MARYKATE O’MEARA ---------------------------------------------------------------SALES MANAGER PATTI FLYNN SENIOR ACCOUNT REPRESENTATIVE AMY MATHENY ACCOUNT REPRESENTATIVES HORACE CLARK, LENI MANA-HOPPENWORTH, NATHANIEL SMITH CLIENT RELATIONSHIP MANAGER TED PIEKARZ DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL JOHN DUNLEVY ---------------------------------------------------------------DISTRIBUTION CONCERNS ted@chicagoreadercorp.com

IN THIS ISSUE

CITY LIFE

3 Joravsky | Politics New podcast The City tells us how Chicago’s always gotten things done. 6 Dukmasova | Politics A voter’s guide to voters’ guides—and more in advance of the 2018 midterms

FOOD & DRINK

7 Restaurant Review A homey new Cuban spot opens in Logan Square.

ARTS & CULTURE

13 Theater Raven Theatre and American Blues Theater oﬀer two perspectives on the lives of black women, written by black women.

14 Theater Frankenstein, Bunnicula, and 14 more stage shows for the spooky season 16 Theater Eclipsed, Black and Blue, and ﬁve more new plays, reviewed by our critics 17 Lit Transparent creator Jill Soloway comes to town with the new book She Wants it: Desire, Power, and Toppling the Patriarchy. 20 Visual Art Humboldt Park’s Time Being Tattoo brings its founders’ DIY spirit to a storefront setting. 21 Comedy The stand-up revue Serenity Now! shows that sober people can still be funny.

2 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 18, 2018

21 Movies Ike Barinholtz’s The Oath is part political satire, part get-meoutta-here. 22 Movies Beautiful Boy, The Hate U Give, and ﬁve more new releases, reviewed by our critics

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

27 Record review Jazz bassist Matt Ulery reinvents his sound—again—on his forthcoming album, Sifting Stars. 28 In Rotation Family-friendly trap records, the album Bad Religion tried to forget, and more 30 Shows of note Robbie Fulks and Linda Gail Lewis, Amy Rigby, Swearin’, and more of the week’s best

CLASSIFIEDS

36 Jobs 36 Apartments & Spaces 36 Marketplace 37 Savage Love What’s a boss to do when an employee shows up at his favorite masturbation party? 38 Early Warnings Art Garfunkel, Macy Gray, New Kids on the Block, and more shows to look for in the weeks to come 38 Gossip Wolf Jenny Pulse drops a danceable new album, local rapper Calid B brings his second AfroBang mixtape to the stage, and more.

STM READER, LLC BOARD PRESIDENT DOROTHY R. LEAVELL TREASURER EILEEN RHODES SECRETARY JESSICA STITES CONSULTANT CAROL E. BELL ---------------------------------------------------------------READER (ISSN 1096-6919) IS PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY STM READER, LLC 2930 S. MICHIGAN, SUITE 102 CHICAGO, IL 60616 COPYRIGHT © 2018 CHICAGO READER PERIODICAL POSTAGE PAID AT CHICAGO, IL ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. CHICAGO READER, READER,

ON THE COVER: HISTORICAL PHOTO FROM THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY 1856-1956 BY PAUL M. ANGLE

Listen to The Ben Joravsky Show on WCPT, 820 AM, Monday through Friday from 2 to 5 PM.

CITY LIFE

THE

MEXICAN 1967

celebrating

POLITICS

City of the quid pro quo

New podcast The City brings back memories of Alderman Bill Henry and dealmaking in Chicago.

By BEN JORAVSKY

YEARS Thanks to Ya’ll

just steps from the Dempster “L” stop

Tue - Sat 10 - 6 847-475-8665

Bill Henry at age 26, when he was still a foot soldier in the 24th Ward é THE CITY

ore than 30 years ago, I heard a relatively unknown west-side politician make a passionate declaration about dealmaking in Chicago that’s been ringing true for me ever since. The politician was 24th Ward alderman William “Bill” Henry. His declaration came amid the chaos and cacophony of the special City Council meeting on December 2, 1987, when aldermen came together to elect an interim mayor in the aftermath of the death of Harold Washington just a few months into his second term. My memories of Henry come back stronger than ever thanks to The City, USA Today’s entertaining and enlightening ten-part podcast created by Robin Amer, my old friend and editor from right here at the Reader. I’ll get into The City in a little bit. Back to that fateful council meeting. The choice for interim mayor came down to aldermen Eugene Sawyer or Tim Evans (now Timothy C. Evans, chief judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County), both of whom are black. As usual, the decision was streaked with racial overtones. Harold Washington was, of course, the ﬁrst and only black mayor elected in Chicago. As such, he embodied the hopes

801 Dempster Evanston

and dreams of hundreds of thousands of black residents. Conversely, he epitomized the worst fears of many white residents that somehow giving more political power to Washington meant taking power away from them, as though Washington would do to them what white pols had been doing to black residents for decades. These were fears that never came close to being true. Chicago’s white power brokers in the council wanted to elect a white successor to Washington. But they couldn’t come up with enough votes to pull that off. So they came up with the next best thing—a black successor who would be more or less amenable to their white constituents. They settled on Sawyer. Meanwhile, most members of Washington’s coalition went with Evans, Washington’s ﬂoor leader. In retrospect, it’s hard to see much difference between Evans and Sawyer—both of them had come up through the ranks of the Democratic machine. But in the immediate aftermath of Washington’s death, it was easy to be overwhelmed with grief and rage. The meeting went on for hours, with protesters in and outside of City Hall chanting “Uncle Tom Sawyer” and accusing Sawyer and his black supporters of looking to return Chicago to the days of “plantation politics.” J

OCTOBER 18, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 3

4 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 18, 2018

CITY LIFE continued from 3 Near the end of the debate, Henry—who’d put together Sawyer’s coalition of black and white aldermen—rose to address the accusations of betrayal and deal cutting, declaring in his inimically bold and booming voice something along the lines of: “Deals? We was all making deals!” Like thousands of other Chicagoans, I was watching the proceedings on TV in utter horror, fascination, and disbeliefx. Henry’s comments hit me like a sledgehammer. His voice was so strong, what he said about dealmaking so true. Of course, Evans and his supporters were making deals, just like Henry and Sawyer had been doing. All politicians make deals—especially in Chicago. It’s the essence of Chicago politics. Over the years I took to quoting Henry’s lines to explain how Chicago politics works. In fact, I was quoting them not long ago when Robin Amer and her fellow reporters—Wilson Sayre and Jenny Casas—interviewed me about Henry’s role in the story their podcast tells. After that interview, I wondered. Did Henry really say exactly what I say he said? I mean, we’re talking about something that went down 30 years ago. I hadn’t taken notes—I was quoting from memory. Maybe I was misquoting him. Maybe he said something like it some other time and I just imagined he said it at the council hearing. Well, my memory received some vindication when Amer recently aired episode three of The City, in which Henry’s introduced as a character. The podcast ran the recording of Henry’s council speech, which Jenny Casas tracked down in the Bob Crawford Archives at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Just hearing Henry’s voice—with all its righteous fury—brought me back in time to the council showdown in the wee hours of 1987. “Let’s talk about the deal. Let’s talk about the deal,” Henry begins. “We all was trying to deal. Everybody had a hidden agenda. . . . Not a person in this City Council has the right to accuse another for cutting a deal. When they was busy cutting a deal.” It’s a concise account of the transactional nature of Chicago politics. Nothing’s free. If you want something, you’ve got to give something to get it—everything’s quid pro quo. It’s a game everyone plays—even the reformers who claim they don’t. His speech ends with catcalls and booing from pro-Evans spectators, as Alderman David Orr, who was running the meeting, slams down his gavel and calls for order.

All politicians make deals— especially in Chicago. It’s the essence of Chicago politics.

Oh, Chicago, my adopted town. “I share your love for that speech,” says Casas. “I love talking about Bill Henry. He’s so tragic to me.” As Casas notes, Sawyer’s election was the pinnacle of Henry’s career. In 1991, he was voted out of office—largely because his constituents never forgave him for helping Sawyer defeat Evans. In 1992, at age 56, he died of cancer. There are so many details about Henry’s life and The City podcast that I’d love to share. But I hesitate to give them away, because the podcast unfolds like a mystery, and I don’t want to ruin its dramatic surprises. In a nutshell, it’s about a sleazy two-timing FBI mole and the dumping of six stories’ worth of concrete debris on a vacant lot in North Lawndale. Residents around the dump were left vulnerable because city officials took bribes to look the other way as the dumping continued. Or they looked the other way because—you know, they didn’t care about poor black people on the west side. Ultimately, it’s a story about graft, greed, and racism, which, alas, are long-standing traits in Chicago. Right up there with cutting deals. v

m @BennyJShow

OCTOBER 18, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 5

CITY LIFE

POLITICS

Every vote counts

Where and what to vote for this midterm election in Chicago By MAYA DUKMASOVA 6 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 18, 2018

é JEFF HELSEL

he spring Democratic primaries may be the hottest elections in Chicago, but there’s plenty of action on this midterm ballot too. This November’s election features an opportunity to decide Illinois’s next governor and attorney general, Cook County’s new tax assessor, and a few contested county commissioner, state legislator, and congressional seats. Plus you can choose whether to retain dozens of judges in our civil and criminal courts. First things first, however: registration. To vote, you must register. Luckily, you can do this at the polls. If you’ve never voted in Chicago before, you should bring two forms of identification, one of them with your current address—like a utility bill or a report card. (You can find more information about ID requirements for voter registration at the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners’ website, chicagoelections.com.) You can vote in Illinois even if you have a felony conviction, by the way. Although the election is on November 6, you can already vote now. Early voting in Chicago is taking place only at 175 W. Washington in the Loop until October 21 (see chicagoelections.com for the hours of operation). Between October 22 and November 5 you can vote early in your own ward, and if you’re a student at the University of Chicago, Chicago State, NEIU, or UIC, you can vote early on campus between October 31 and November 2; both neighborhood and campus locations are listed at chicagoelections.com. You may be wondering: What’s my ward? What’s my precinct? WHAT’S A PRECINCT? Chicago’s 50 wards are gerrymandered into completely illogical geographies, and there’s nothing wrong with not knowing. Each ward is subdivided into precincts. To vote early after October 21, or to vote on Election Day itself, figure out your ward and precinct with the handy tool at chicagoelections.com. The results will not only show and tell you where your polling place is, but also let you know which ward, congressional district, state house and senate districts, judicial subcircuit, county district, Board of Review district, and any other special districts you fall into. It’s OK if you don’t know what these districts are or what the people elected to over-

see them do. Under the “public officials” tab you’ll ﬁnd the names of the people currently holding these offices. And in the “sample ballot” tab you can see whether you actually have a choice about them. Many candidates run unopposed. You’ll also see referendum questions on the ballot—designed to gauge your support for issues like raising the minimum wage, cracking down on gun dealers, or banning plastic straws. The sample ballot provided by the Board of Elections is a little rudimentary. I prefer the sample ballots on the League of Women Voters’ website, vote411.com, which is more interactive. Those won’t be available until closer to Election Day, however. Ballot Ready (ballotready.org) also has an excellent interactive site and an app too. It explains what every office is. As you consider each candidate on your personalized ballot, you’ll see who’s endorsed them and where they stand on various issues. By far the largest chunk of the ballot is devoted to judges (75 of the 94 items on my ballot, for example). You’ll see name after name that you’ve never heard of before with a demand to vote yes or no on allowing him or her to continue to do a job you might not know a lot about—unless you’re one of about 350,000 people who face criminal cases in Cook County every year, or maybe one of the 30,000 people who wind up in eviction court. Almost every judicial candidate and sitting judge is rated by one of the local bar associations, but ultimately those rankings amount to lawyers’ opinions about the judges they have to work with. For an in-depth analysis the Injustice Watch judicial election guide at injusticewatch.org is highly recommended. In addition to the bar rankings, it has information about which part of the court system judges are in, any problems with their rulings, controversies they’ve been involved in, and their sentencing tendencies. If you’re overwhelmed by researching candidates on your own, South Side Weekly will be holding a ballot-building event on Friday, October 26, from 6 to 8 PM at Build Coffee, 6100 S. Blackstone (reservations required; sign up at facebook.com/ events/583015502117711). v

m @ mdoukmas

TASTE OF HAVANA | $$ R 2529 N. Milwaukee 312-273-1774 tasteofhavana.net

FOOD & DRINK Picadillo with plantains é MATTHEW SCHWERIN

RESTAURANT REVIEW

Taste of Havana restores a Cuban presence to Logan Square

This simple, homey food never gets old. By MIKE SULA

t’s just traditional Cuban food,” Orlando Miranda told me. “It’s not brain surgery.” Miranda is the 65-year-old face of the group of investors that recently opened Taste of Havana in Logan Square on a stretch of Milwaukee Avenue I seem to be writing an awful lot about lately. He says his chefs like to lay low. “Basically, within the community people know their food but not their faces. Humble people. They don’t like the limelight.” Miranda, a former marketing guy, will take it. He and his partners opened the two-monthold restaurant to occupy themselves in various states of retirement and semiretirement, he says, inspired by the closing last year of their former hangout nearby, homey hole-in-thewall El Rinconcito Cubano. “But also we want to make a buck too.” Taste of Havana is a bit more elegante than El Rinconcito Cubano was. The alluring aroma of fried garlic pervades a long brick-walled dining room with a glowing bar devoted to mojitos and other alcoholic pursuits; there’s also a coffee bar for cortaditos and cafes con leche in the rear. The idea, says Miranda, who came to Miami from Florida, Camagüey, at the age of eight, was to evoke the spirit of prerevolutionary Havana, a mood underscored by servers sporting white guayaberas but perhaps diminished by the wine racks filled with bottles of Two-Buck Chuck hanging on the wall, “Don’t order those wines,” said a fellow one evening, laughing as he passed out samples of the kitchen’s frita Cubana, a burger of pork, chorizo, and beef topped with fried potato sticks. “Those are strictly decoration.” All the other members of the Cuban sandwich family are accounted for on the menu— pan con bistec, medianoche, etc—as well as a hijacked Chicagorican jibarito named El Guajirito (the Cuban analogue to the Puerto Rican “little yokel”). The gold-standard Cubano is an unusually stacked version relative to the bread-forward norm, thick with ham and pork tenderloin still snugly contained within its pressed bread coffin, its proper proportional balance of cheese, pickles, butter, and mustard contributing the necessary fatty-acid chemistry within. J

OCTOBER 18, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 7

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continued from 7 There’s a capable fry game among Miranda’s humble chefs, who put out soft, creamy ham croquettes and picadillo-stuffed mashed-potato papas rellenas, each contained within a delicate, crunchy breadcrumb batter. Flaky beef or chicken empanadas, thick batons of fried yuca, and dense, caramelized fried sweet plantains display the same deft touch with the fry basket. There’s a lot to work with on this menu, particularly the beefy classics from the Cuban canon—four different approaches to the ﬂat, thin bistec, plus liver and onions, skirt steak with chimichurri, and the formidable vaca frita, shredded and deep-fried flank steak topped with onions, a cousin to the stewier ropa vieja, aka “torn clothes.” The majority of the allium prevalent in the atmosphere comes from the garlic-onion-bell pepper sofrito that forms the base of many of these dishes, though I suspect a large minority issues from the fat, snappy garlic shrimp. The daily chalkboard specials are where things get interesting, featuring less common and/or more labor-intensive slow cookers like oxtail stew, arroz con pollo, and a two-person seafood paella or a greasy-good Cuban-style fried rice with chicken, ham, and shrimp. Saturday features the starchy, meaty soup ajiaco Cubano, more commonly known as sancocho

Ham croquettes, papas rellenas, plantain chips, and a Cuban tamale é MATTHEW SCHWERIN

in Puerto Rico, thick with yuca, squash, pork, corn on the cob, and the dried beef tasajo that gives it so much depth. The bar pours some surprisingly boozy yet balanced mojitos, relative to their common cloying profile, particularly a slightly bitter grapefruit variant, and a full-bodied mango wine (there are some drinkable wines, less suitable for wall art). Miranda told me that as late as the 80s the space was occupied by a well-known Cuban

spot known as La Lechonera. These days Cuban food in Chicago isn’t exactly endangered, but with Bia’s in Irving Park resurrecting the late, great Café Mariano on Milwaukee, and now Taste of Havana picking up for El Rinconcito Cubano, these homey, comforting classics endure in a worthy form. Miranda’s right. It isn’t brain surgery—but it’s nothing to be humble about either. v

@MikeSula

THE LONG DEATH OF JEAN LALIME

A classic tale of Chicago corruption, and also of rabbinical law, frontier justice, and the city’s ﬁrst murder

By PAUL DAILING The bones of Jean Lelime é HISTORICAL PHOTO FROM THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY 1856-1956 BY PAUL M. ANGLE

IN AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION

in the far western suburbs sits a warehouse full of newspapers, architectural renderings, ship anchors, horse-drawn carriages, a Checker cab, a shed where a Maxwell Street peddler once copied keys and sold condoms, a “mannequin morgue” that none of the historians want to go near at night, and the corpse of Chicago’s ﬁrst murder victim. Jean Lalime, or what’s left of what the Chicago History Museum thinks is him, is in a box. The box isn’t the “rude pine coffin” that broke open and spilled out a corpse, startling a group of cellar diggers on April 29, 1891, nor is it the soap box cops threw Lalime’s tattered bits in for a ride to the East Chicago Avenue police station. The box is a glass-fronted display case historian Joseph Kirkland commissioned shortly thereafter to hold the arms, legs, pelvis, ribs, and jawless glaring skull that he and a police officer bought off a morgue worker “at a merely nominal expense.” The story of Lalime’s 1812 murder at the hands of early settler John Kinzie is a popular lie, still found everywhere from the Kinzie Hotel website to National Register of Historic Places paperwork. Until 20th-century researchers started unraveling the story, the history-book version, traced back to Kinzie’s wife and one of their servants, told the world that “the Little Frenchman” had tried to shoot Kinzie and Kinzie had stabbed him dead in self-defense. The real story can be found in informants’ letters to the War Department, written in the months surrounding the murder. Unpublished until the 1940s, these letters tell the story of three forgotten men who tried and failed to end the corruption, bribery, and smuggling that deﬁned life at the fort that became Chicago. One of those men rests in a box in the suburbs. The second was killed in the Fort Dearborn Massacre; Kinzie’s heirs took special care to assign the man a coward’s death. The third escaped through a lucky stint as a prisoner of war, living out his years believing that John Kinzie had organized that massacre to cover his crime. J

OCTOBER 18, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 9

continued from 9

Jean Lalime’s journey from silenced snitch to museum storage piece is also a story of Torah code, Lincoln’s blood, Little Bo Peep, and a fallout shelter full of corsets. But it starts and stops with the Chicago History Museum’s lone corpse, a French interpreter who was stabbed to death in broad daylight and cold blood by the man that a century’s worth of history books would call a founding father of the city of Chicago.

PART 1: ‘BRAIN SLICES, FETUSES, ALL THESE THINGS’

Peter Alter laughs when pressed for details about Jean Lalime. “What I do know is that a lot is not known,” says Alter, the Chicago History Museum’s historian and director of the Studs Terkel Center for Oral History. “Sort of like ‘Did Shoeless Joe Jackson cheat?’ and ‘Who threw the bomb at Haymarket?’ and some of those other questions in Chicago history that actually make this job pretty fun: We don’t know exactly.” For years, the bones of Chicago’s first murder victim were part of a display collection that included real relics like Lincoln’s deathbed alongside sideshow fare like the skin of the serpent from Eden, the mummy of Moses’s foster mother, the fleece from Little Bo Peep’s lamb, a sliver of the True Cross, and the knife that Lady MacBeth used to kill Duncan. “There was a mixture of relics as well as kind of a cabinet of curiosities that was really common in museum practice well into the 20th century,” Alter says. “To our late 20th-, early 21st-century mind it does seem odd.” Then there’s Abe Lincoln. In 2001, the Chicago History Museum launched “Wet With Blood,” a website and investigation into the museum’s Lincoln relics—including the cloak Mary Todd Lincoln wore at Ford’s Theatre and Lincoln’s deathbed—that were stained with the president’s blood. New advances in DNA research in the late 90s would allow the blood to be studied more closely than ever before. It raised a dilemma, Alter says. Studying the blood would have destroyed the small, then-136-year-old flecks. The museum had to pick between researching the blood in a lab and preserving it for future generations. But that would set a precedent. Deciding that a few drops of blood were just as much human remains as was a box of bones, the museum decided that whatever it did for Lincoln, it had to do for Lalime. The museum picked preservation. No chipping apart for research, no reburial. Although records show Lalime’s bones were on the museum display floor as late as 1952, no one knows when or why they were moved to the museum’s basement storage space. But they were moved to the suburbs in 2012 because of the rabbis. “My father-in-law came to me, actually in the synagogue one day, and he said ‘Is a kohen allowed to go to the zoo?’” says Rabbi Mordechai Millunchick, rabbi at Adas Yeshurun, a synagogue in West Ridge. That was in 2008, and Millunchick said he’d look into it. His father-in-law had just heard a radio interview with a Northwestern researcher who compared the number of bodies supposedly removed from the former city cemetery in Lincoln Park in the 1870s and 1880s to the number reburied in other cemeteries. The researcher had found a 12,000-corpse gap, which suggested to her that those bodies were still buried under the park, the zoo, and surrounding homes, the Reader reported in 2008. This meant a day at the zoo could be devastating for certain Jews who must avoid dead bodies.

10 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 18, 2018

Kohanim—the plural of kohen, also spelled kohain—are, in Jewish tradition, a priestly clan descended from Moses’s brother, Aaron. When the messiah comes and rebuilds the Temple in Jerusalem (the Romans destroyed the last iteration in 70 CE), the kohenim will be called upon to perform certain rites, so they must keep themselves free from impurities such as the “tumah” coming from dead bodies. The only ceremony that cleanses a kohen who came in contact with death involves a red heifer that meets certain rigorous genetic standards. In all of history, Jewish law says, only nine heifers ever ﬁt the bill. Observant Jews have been looking for the tenth cow for almost 2,000 years. Without that heifer, avoiding death is extremely important for kohanim. If they ﬁnd they’re in a building with a dead body they must leave immediately. They can’t go to the funerals of anyone but spouses, parents, or children, or even walk under the shadow of a branch from a tree that overlaps a different tree that falls over a cemetery. Medically minded kohanim often choose careers in dentistry so they can avoid med-school cadaver work, Millunchick says. His father-in-law’s question led Millunchick to write “Chicago Area Museums & Zoos: A Kohain’s Guide,” available on the Chicago Rabbinical Council website. It’s a tourist’s guide to death, including the Morton family plot at the Morton Arboretum and the Goodman Theatre, where improv legend Charna Halpern passed off a skull from a Skokie medical supply shop as the late Del Close’s. Close wanted to play Yorick after death, and Halpern couldn’t convince the hospital to chop off and skin the iO founder’s head. “It’s well-known that the Field Museum is off limits to kohanim,” Millunchick says. “They have mummies, skulls, bones, skeletons. You name it they have it. The Museum of Science and Industry is also similarly off-limits—brain slices, fetuses, all these things the kohanim would avoid.” In researching the guide, Millunchick cold-called the history museum to ask if it had any dead folks on the premises. As it had given Moses’s mummy’s mummy to the Field decades earlier, the only one left was Jean Lalime. “Originally when we had mentioned it to them, they opened up, they showed us [Lalime] and they said, ‘If there’s anything we can do . . . ’” Millunchick remembers. “They weren’t at that time able to move him off-site.” Four years later, in 2012, “Shalom Chicago,” a temporary exhibit highlighting the city’s Jewish past, opened. The museum moved Lalime to the west-suburban storage warehouse so kohanim could attend. The warehouse is one of the museum’s two main off-site storage locations. The other, mainly used for historical clothing, is a northwest suburban fallout shelter built by a downtown bank for its executives during the red scare. “Because in Armageddon, you would need your bank records and you would need the VPs and so forth,” Alter says, laughing. When Lalime is on the museum’s main campus—as his remains were last year for study and measurements—the museum informs the rabbinical council. “I think that’s a prime example of the ability to create a relationship between people who have a need for this information and the museums,” the rabbi says. As for the zoo, the Rabbinical Council gave Lincoln Park the kohen OK, except for the big red barn at Farm in the Zoo (workers digging the foundation in 1962 uncovered a casket and, getting no guidance from City Hall, reburied it and poured the concrete on top) and the softball diamonds, which had been built over the cemetery’s former Jewish section. The Jewish United

Fund Youth Leadership Division’s softball league jokes that’s why its games are held in the less convenient Stanton Park, a member of one of the teams, the Chicago White Lox, told me.

PART 2: ‘A PERFECT ASSASSINATION’

The story behind the murder at Fort Dearborn involves classic Chicago corruption and nepotism. To get to that story, meet the factor (a military officer tasked with not cheating indigenous Americans) and the sutler (a civilian whose political connections let him cheat almost every white person in sight). From 1795 to 1822, each U.S. military fort was equipped with a trading post called a factory that traded European-style goods—at cost—for furs from local tribes. The goal wasn’t profit, but to keep valuable pelts away from the British and convince the tribes that the U.S. was a friend. The factory system was a colossal failure. Private traders were better funded (John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company alone was founded with more than three times the capital of the entire national factory system) and had higherquality goods. The factors were also hamstrung by having to offer congressionally approved goods that, according to the 1822 government report that recommended scrapping the program, included tea, wigs, ostrich plumes, snuff boxes, and “green silk fancy ribands and morocco slippers” that the tribes had no use for. The fort’s other trading post was run by the sutler, a local shopkeeper granted the exclusive right to sell goods to soldiers at whatever rates he chose—as long as the officers who appointed him got their own goods cheap. By 1809, Fort Dearborn’s mandatory shopping spot was Cooper & Whistler’s, which charged 50 percent more for tobacco, whiskey, shoe brushes, and sugar than the other local traders, and twice as much for bullets. “Cooper” was surgeon’s mate Dr. John Cooper, the fort’s doctor. “Whistler” was the son of fort commander Captain John Whistler and brother-in-law of fort lieutenant Thomas Hamilton. “If Officers of the Army are allowed to be sutlers, innumerable evils will naturally follow. The temtation [sic] to extortion is, with ordinary minds, irresistible,” the newly appointed factor, Matthew Irwin, wrote to the War Department on December 30, 1809. “The soldiers who are to be victims of imposition must then, if they have the hardihood to complain, be silenced by severe punishments; or, on the Other hand, quieted by indulgences calculated to insubordinate them. This garrison presents a striking example of such consequences.” After Irwin ratted to the War Department on the sutler situation, Hamilton, Cooper, and Captain Whistler—whose grandson would paint Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, better known as “Whistler’s Mother”—were quietly transferred. But in a template for the city that followed, Fort Dearborn’s corruption scandal didn’t create reform. It created a job opening. Just over two years later, on January 17, 1812, Whistler’s replacement, Captain Nathan Heald, issued a garrison order making “Messrs. Kinzie & Forsyth” the exclusive fort sutlers. Despite his well-known sympathy for (and rumored spying on behalf of) the British, and persistent accusations that he ran guns to messianic Shawnee leader Tenskwatawa, known as “the Prophet,” Kinzie landed the gig in the most Chicago way possible: He was connected. Hamilton’s replacement, Lieutenant Linai Helm, was Kinzie’s son-in-law. As for the fort commander, Irwin suspected Kinzie held something over Heald that kept the captain pliant.

The record of the sale of Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable’s trading point to Jean Lalime in 1800, witnessed by John Kinzie é WAYNE COUNTY REGISTER OF DEEDS

“[T]o my regret, I found this man had obtained so great an ascendency over the Captain as to render my [warnings] unavailing, and I also found they were connected in many improper concerns,” Irwin wrote the War Department in an I-told-you-so letter on October 12, 1812, after Fort Dearborn’s destruction. Kinzie—the local trader Irwin used as an example of honest pricing when telling the War Department about Cooper & Whistler’s gouging—immediately jacked up his own prices. Starting with a letter to the War Department on January 19, 1812, Irwin began unraveling what he saw as a conspiracy. He hinted that Kinzie and Heald were cohort and crony in numerous dirty dealings, but his only specific charge was in a March 10 letter that he had “lately ascertained it to be an absolute fact that Messrs. Kinzie & Forsyth, offered a gentleman 400$ per annum [just shy of $6,000 a year in 2018 money] to get them appointed at Washington the Suttlers [sic] for this place.” Irwin detailed the wrongdoings at Fort Dearborn over several months, firing off letters to the War Department with each discovery. In the meantime, Irwin found two allies as horrified by the sutler contract as he was: surgeon’s mate Dr. Isaac Van Voorhis and fort interpreter Jean Lalime. In April 1812, a band of Winnebago killed two white settlers at nearby Hardscrabble (today called Bridgeport, but since it wasn’t Chicago at the time, Lalime is still considered the city’s first murder victim). Kinzie and Helm cried for blood, not just from the Winnebago, but from the friendly Chippewa and Ottawa tribes as well. “Propositions were openly made to murder them as well as some French persons (with Indian wives) who have, ever since they have been here, manifested peaceable dispositions,” Irwin wrote on April 16. “The principal persons who advised & insisted upon such measures being carried into effect, were the Suttler [sic] for this garrison & his Son-in law—Lt Helm.” Although Irwin didn’t say if Lalime was the French person with a Native American wife who had been threatened (local trader Francois Le Mai fit the bill as well), the factor openly sus-

pected Kinzie and Helm of trying to incite war between the U.S. and the tribes. Kinzie, Helm, and ensign George Ronan spent months stoking anger among the soldiers, spared punishment by whatever secret power the sutling contract gave them over Heald. Ronan threatened to shoot Lalime, and Helm “swore ‘he would take the Scalp of the Factor’” with impunity. Heald did arrest Helm in May for plotting to murder six Sauk who had come to the fort in peace (Van Voorhis had overheard Helm and some men scheming and told Irwin, who told Heald), but released the lieutenant after he apologized. Kinzie was behind it all, the doctor and factor alleged. War between the U.S. and the tribes would be good business for a gunrunner working for the British, plus the factory was in direct competition with Kinzie’s proﬁtable illegal trading with the tribes. The situation reached a head. On June 17, around 6 PM, inside Fort Dearborn, Helm went on a tirade about Irwin to Van Voorhis and Lalime, concluding, according to a June 30 letter from the doctor, “by saying he would give a very handsome treat if the Factory would be done away!” Kinzie took his sonin-law’s side in the argument. Lalime stood up for Irwin. “[T]he unfortunate Interpreter defended the pure motives and just dealings of the lnstitution,” Van Voorhis wrote. What happened next is lost to history. Neither Van Voorhis nor Irwin went into details of glinting blades or evil grins; they were writing official communications to the U.S. government, not the glamorized frontier sagas later published by Kinzie’s heirs. A knife came out. Lalime was dead. Kinzie saw that Irwin had seen the whole thing from 20 to 30 yards away, and called out that he was a “lost man,” according to Irwin’s report to the War Department. Ronan told Kinzie to run. Helm helped Kinzie. Heald did nothing. Murder had come to Chicago. “I need not trouble you, Sir, with the minutia of this affair; suffice it to say that it was a perfect assassination and can be proven to be such,” Van Voorhis wrote the War Department in his June 30 letter. “[I] shall ever be ready, when my person is secure, to substantiate what I have stated.” Two weeks later, Van Voorhis himself lay dead on the beach by what’s now 18th Street.

PART 3: ‘THEY FELL DOWN TOGETHER’

Two of the reasons Jean Lalime is a trivia factoid and John Kinzie the namesake of streets, hotels, and steak houses are the War of 1812 and the Fort Dearborn Massacre. The war broke out the day after the stabbing. The massacre—although there has been an effort over the last few years to call the events of August 15, 1812, the Battle of Fort Dearborn—happened after Fort Mackinac fell to the British and General William Hull ordered Heald to evacuate Fort Dearborn and the surrounding area and travel overland to Detroit. Aware of the impending departure, a splinter group of Potawatomi attacked the refugees a mile and a half from the fort, on the lakefront near 18th Street. According to Heald’s official report, the Fort Dearborn dead included 26 of the 54 soldiers, all 12 of the militiamen, two women, and 12 children. The remainder were taken prisoner. The tribe then burned down the fort. The Kinzies were among the Fort Dearborn group. Although no first-person accounts say how John Kinzie rejoined the community, family legend later printed as history had it that he ﬂed to Milwaukee, returning to the fort after the fuss died down, where he was immediately cleared of all charges. The

virulently pro-British family waited out the War of 1812 in Detroit, claiming they’d switched over to the American side. “That the fate of La Lime should be obliterated by the horrors and confusion of a three years’ war was only natural,” historian Milo Quaife wrote in his 1913 book Chicago and the Old Northwest. When the victorious U.S. military returned to Chicago in 1816 to build the second Fort Dearborn, the Kinzie family came too, and were regarded as eyewitness experts on what had happened at the first settlement. They could say whatever they wanted—anyone who could contradict them never came back to Chicago or was already dead. In the version of events Kinzie’s daughter-in-law Juliette published in 1844’s Narrative of the Massacre at Chicago, August 15, 1812, and of Some Preceding Events and 1856’s Wau-Bun: The ‘Early Day’ in the North-West, when John Kinzie arrived in Chicago in the very early 1800s, he bought from a man named Francois Le Mai a little shack built by Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable, and turned the rundown trading post into an economic powerhouse, earning the love and respect of everyone but Lalime, whom Juliette described as “insanely jealous.” “One dark night, [Kinzie] crossed over [the river] into the fort, and just as he was entering the inclosure, a man sprang out from behind the gate-post and plunged a knife into his neck. It was Lalime. Quick as a flash, Mr. Kinzie drew his knife and dealt Lalime a furious blow, and a fatal one. The man fell like a log into the river below,” Juliette wrote, reporting her mother-in-law’s version of events as fact. Lalime’s powerful fort friends got their revenge, she wrote, by burying Lalime in Kinzie’s yard just north of the Chicago River on what’s now Michigan Avenue. “Great was their chagrin and dissapointment [sic], however, when Mr. Kinzie, far from being annoyed at their action, proceeded to make Lalime’s grave his especial care,” Juliette Kinzie continued. “Flowers were planted on it and it was kept in most beautiful order. Many a half hour, the Kinzie children had longed to spend in play, was occupied by their father’s orders in raking the dead leaves away from Lalime’s grave and watering its flowers.” The only thing actually flowery was Juliette Kinzie’s prose. “I don’t think his grave was very near Mr. Kinzie’s house,” former Kinzie family servant Victoire Porthier, who grew up in that house, told historian A.T. Andreas, as quoted in 1883’s History of Chicago. “I don’t remember that Mr. Kinzie ever took care of the grave.” Irwin never said anything about the grave, just that Kinzie’s son-in-law made off with the corpse. “The Citizens were anxious an inquest should be held in the body, but a file of soldiers headed by Lt. Helm carried it away by force,” Irwin wrote in July 1812. The Kinzie family version of events is full of similarly overwrought dramatic stories that slammed their rivals and deified their patriarch. They cast Lalime as an obsessed assassin, Du Sable as a shack-dwelling business failure, Heald as a bungler who chose to march the fort into a massacre, and, in the passage of the Narrative that detailed the Fort Dearborn Massacre, Van Voorhis as a coward who tried to bribe the Potawatomi for a few more seconds of life while screaming “I am not fit to die!” Whatever more serious historians suspected about the Kinzies’ fairy tales—Kirkland called the description of Van Voorhis’s death “fanciful (hysterical?)” in a footnote in the 1892 book The Story of Chicago, while Quaife’s Chicago and the Old Northwest, 1673-1835 suggested that comparing J

OCTOBER 18, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 11

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Juliette Kinzie’s writing to fact “is to dispel all conﬁdence in its reliability and in the candor of its author”—the stories were for decades the only version of events available to the public. They were the source taught in schools, cited in lectures, and immortalized in statues on the Michigan Avenue Bridge. The winners didn’t write the history books. The books—including Narrative, Wau-bun, and Nellie Kinzie Gordon’s 1910 John Kinzie, the Father of Chicago: A Sketch and her 1912 republication of Helm’s version of August 15—were how the Kinzies made themselves the winners. At the time the cellar diggers found Lalime, the only account of the killing not directly from a Kinzie came from Porthier, the former Kinzie family servant who talked to Andreas in 1883 about her experiences as a little girl. Her version of events differed from the Narrative’s story of the stabbing, putting the murder by the fort gates, setting it in daylight, and adding a gun. “It was sunset when they used to shut the gates of the fort. Kinzie and Lalime came out together and soon we [Porthier and her sister] heard Lieutenant Helm call out for Mr. Kinzie to look out for Lalime, as he had a pistol. Quick we saw the men come together we heard the pistol go off and saw the smoke. Then they fell down together,” she told Andreas when she was an old woman. “You see Kinzie wasn’t to blame at all. He didn’t have any pistol nor knife—nothing,” she said. “After Lalime shot him and Kinzie got his arms around him, he (Lalime) pulled out his dirk and as they fell he was stabbed with his own knife. That is what they all said.” Cracks started to form in the story in the 20th century, when Quaife found a few of Irwin’s letters, although the State Department wouldn’t publish many of those quoted in this story until 1948. “To those who subscribe to a traditional estimate local to

THE WINNERS DIDN’T WRITE THE HISTORY BOOKS. THE BOOKS WERE HOW THE KINZIES MADE THEMSELVES THE WINNERS. 12 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 18, 2018

Chicago which pictures Kinzie as a kind of demigod, Irwin’s charge that in addition to being a murderer and a traitor he contrived the massacre of the garrison and settlers in order to destroy the witnesses of his crime will come as a distinct shock,” Quaife wrote in a 1915 article for The Mississippi Valley Historical Review. The Wayne County Register of Deeds in Detroit—Chicago was part of that county during Northwest Territory days—debunks many of the Kinzies’ claims. Their records show Lalime, not Le Mai, bought Du Sable’s trading post in 1800, bankrolled by Lalime and Kinzie’s mutual boss, fur trader William Burnett. It couldn’t have been confusion; Kinzie signed as witness. Neither Wayne County, the Illinois State Archives, nor the Indiana State Archives—Chicago became part of the Indiana Territory after the Northwest Territory dissolved in 1803—could ﬁnd any record for this story of the next time the property changed hands, but Kinzie was living in the house as early as 1803. Illinois records indicate Kinzie did officially buy the downtown Chicago property from the U.S. government as unclaimed land in 1830. So as not to contradict the prominent Kinzie family, a convention developed that “Lalime” was “Le Mai” misspelled. The supposed correction appeared in books, on official records, and on the plaque that marked the spot of the “Kinzie Mansion” for decades. The National Parks Service listed “Le Mai” as an alternate spelling of “Lalime” in the paperwork that added the Du Sable Homesite to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. The real Francois Le Mai died in 1828, a historian combing through Peoria County probate records discovered in the 1940s. John Kinzie’s son James brought the body to officials, so the family knew who Le Mai was—and that he wasn’t Jean Lalime.

PART 4: ‘I SHALL BE MUCH DECEIVED’

Lalime’s body lay at Kinzie’s feet by the corner of Wacker and Michigan, just west of what is now the hockey souvenir shop and across the river from Trump Tower. After the murder, Kinzie hid in the fort garrison for about four hours, until Lieutenant Helm walked him to the river’s edge, shook his hand, and let the future father of Chicago run free. Although Kinzie was seen prowling the area for days and a sentinel saw Helm sneaking his father-in-law food and wine, half-hearted effort after half-hearted effort failed to catch the killer. Heald turned the sutler post over to Kinzie’s brother. “Such conduct is not difficult to account for: Were the suttling business left open or free for any person to attend to it, a Secret might be disclosed on the part of Kinzie or his connections, which, at this time, might not be very agreeable,” Irwin wrote in his July letter. “lt is the dread of this which has, at all times, deprived Cap. Heald of energy, & rendered him, as it does now, a mere statue & instrument.” Suspicious of a group of two or three men—Irwin referred to them as “Indians”—who started hanging around the factory, Irwin started bunking with Van Voorhis so they could watch each other’s backs. It was a bad time for the War Department to write back. It had received his January 19 letter and would order Heald to regulate how much Kinzie’s sutler shop charged the men. The letter came through official channels, meaning Heald saw it before Irwin did. That night, Heald issued a report that the fugitive Kinzie had been spotted. He ordered Irwin to apprehend him. Out in the woods. At night. Alone with Ensign Ronan.

When Irwin refused, Heald ordered him out of the garrison (Irwin ended up sleeping in the factory), reassigned the soldier who waited on Irwin, gave Irwin six days to find a replacement for the soldier, destroyed Irwin’s vegetable garden, and fired off his own official War Department communique calling Irwin a bad friend and confirming some facts about the murder in the process. “And, when you report to the [U.S. Secretary of War] that I have refused to protect your person any longer or suffer you to sleep in the garrison, be good enough to inform him that it was in Consequence of your refusing to obey my orders when Called on to assist in apprehending a Citizen who had but a few days previous stabed [sic] an other citizen to the heart in your presence,” Heald wrote. Irwin left Fort Dearborn on July 5 to hire a new interpreter. He arrived at Fort Mackinac just in time to become a British prisoner of war. By the time he was released, it was too late to go back to Chicago, where he would have ended up among the Fort Dearborn dead. Irwin blamed one man for the deaths of the people he had worked with, lived with, feuded with, and informed on over the last three years: John Kinzie. “The plots entered into by this man to destroy friendly Indians—the methods he had taken to inveigle the Officers (with the exception of the Surgeon’s mate) into improper concerns— his bold and menacing conduct to the Citizens, if they dared to doubt his intentions—all tended to convince me that he felt an interest in bringing about an Indian War,” Irwin wrote the War Department on October 12. “Should he not have been instrumental in the fate of Chicago, I shall be much deceived, because if he fulfilled his part as emissary, he had it much in his power to preserve his own life by destroying the Witnesses to the murder of Lalime.” The War Department wrote back on October 27 that, since the Fort Dearborn factory was no more, Irwin’s services would no longer be required, but that his salary would be continued until he felt ready to come back to work. There was a war on, and after that a fort to rebuild at Chicago. One dead Frenchman was a mystery no one had time to look into.

FINALE: ‘THE MOST ENJOYABLE’

On June 21, 1891, historian Joseph Kirkland gave a lecture advertised in the local papers and presented the Chicago Historical Society with a box of bones. Kirkland focused his talk not on the murder, but on proving that the bones dug up at Illinois and Cass—the current site of Benny’s Chop House—could be Jean Lalime’s. He tracked Kinzie’s property based on the story that Kinzie had tended Lalime’s grave lovingly and guessed at a reburial at the ﬁrst Saint James Church, which was roughly near where the body was found. He contacted old settlers, who said they were scared of going near the site as children, and that the older kids told them a man the father of Chicago had killed was buried roughly roundabout maybe sorta close to there. The society, and Chicago, were satisﬁed. The Chicago Historical Society’s minutes called it “the most enjoyable mid-summer meeting the Society has held for years.” v

Paul Dailing writes the blog 1,001 Chicago Afternoons, where you can read more about the murder of Jean Lalime.

m @1001chicago

R READER RECOMMENDED

b ALL AGES

ARTS & CULTURE Crumbs From the Table of Joy; Flyin’ West é MICHAEL BROSILOW

THEATER

Two takes on black women’s lives, by black women

Crumbs From the Table of Joy and Flyin’ West resonate together in separate productions. By TONY ADLER

ne American’s promised land is another’s Egypt. Unless you’re a Native American (in which case you’ve got problems all your own), you and yours came here either to get free or to be sold into slavery. No wonder there’s so little commonality between this country’s white and black people, quite aside from the horrors of racism: Even if it were possible to wave a magic equity wand over the nation, so that everybody suddenly had a fair chance, our narratives would still be diametrically opposed. Perfect inversions of each other, in fact. Two plays running now at Chicago theaters concern black people doing their best to escape the hell of the white man’s heaven. In an odd bit of synchronicity, both were written by African-American women, both date from the ﬁrst half of the 1990s, and both are being staged—respectably—by companies that aren’t particularly well-known for their explorations of the black experience. By far the most successful of the pair is Lynn Nottage’s Crumbs From the Table of Joy, as directed by Tyrone Phillips for Raven Theatre. It’s a memory play, although the memories

aren’t Nottage’s. They belong to a teenage black girl named Ernestine Crump, whose dad, Godfrey, goes a little mad when his wife dies. Sometimes in scenes and sometimes in direct address to the audience Ernestine (a glowing Chanell Bell) recounts how Godfrey became so frantically imbued with Father Divine—a 20th-century black preacher who declared himself God—that he left Tennessee for Brooklyn, thinking he’d find Divine’s Jerusalem there. (In a sweetly quixotic touch, Godfrey turns out to be wrong about that. Divine was based in Philadelphia in 1950, when the action of the play unfolds; Brooklyn was merely the home address of a company that manufactured one of his miracle elixirs.) The Crumps change their family name to the Divine-ly inspired “Goodness” and settle into a basement apartment. Ernestine’s adventures in Brooklyn would amount to little more than a conventionally eccentric coming-of-age story—crying along to Joan Crawford movies with little sister Ermina (a mischievous, endearing Brandi Jiminez Lee), trying to ﬁt in with her citiﬁed classmates—if not for two grown women. One is Godfrey’s German-born second wife, Gerte

(Emily Tate), who becomes a lightning rod for all of Ernestine’s pain—her mourning, her dislocation, her confused sense of self as a black girl with starry white ambitions. The other is her Aunt Lily. A truly singular creation, both as written by Nottage and embodied by the marvelous Brianna Buckley, Lily shows up and moves in, ostensibly out of a sense of obligation to her dead sister, trailing the scent of a Harlem awakening characterized by bebop and communism, hipster style and bohemian raptures—all of it intermingled with the smell of alcohol on her breath. Aunt Lily brings a tragic wildness to Crumbs From the Table of Joy, tragic wildness being precisely what Pearl Cleage’s Flyin’ West lacks. Or, more accurately, renounces. Earnest in tone, folkloric in approach, and ultimately plodding in Chuck Smith’s staging for American Blues Theater, Cleage’s drama takes a fascinating passage from American history and makes it the occasion for a morality play about the nobility of black self-reliance—especially self-reliance among black women—and the treachery of those who would imitate white ways. We’re in Nicodemus, Kansas, a real community founded by black settlers during Reconstruction. It’s 1898, a full 52 years before Ernestine’s trip to Brooklyn. Fannie Dove, her adopted sister Sophie, and old Miss Leah have formed a family of affinity on a farm the sisters own under the Homestead Act. Wary Sophie (a stalwart Tiffany Oglesby) is busy trying to fend off a frontier version of gentriﬁcation, but the real threat sneaks up behind her when the youngest Dove sister, Minnie, returns from Europe to visit Nicodemus in the company of her husband, Frank, a foppish poet with marcelled hair, expensive tastes,

and a deep, self-loathing desire to distance himself from all things black. The battle between the plain, hard-working settlers and the malign, acculturating forces represented by Frank is as unsubtle as Frank’s conk, not only in its general trajectory but in its plot devices. Certain things can be seen coming from very far away on these Kansas plains.

CRUMBS FROM THE R TABLE OF JOY Through 11/18: Thu-Sat 7:30

PM, Sun 3 PM, Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark, 773-338-2177, raventheatre.com, $43, $38 seniors and teachers, $15 students and military.

FLYIN’ WEST

Through 11/3, Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM, Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont, 773-327-5252, americanbluestheater.com, $29-$39.

The result is very edifying and—with the exception of a great story Joslyn Jones’s Miss Leah tells about a very unusual apple pie— fairly tedious. It didn’t have to be this way. Frank, for one thing, could be a good deal more complex than he’s permitted to be in Wardell Julius Clark’s performance. At minimum, it might be worth seeing some small hint of the man Minnie says she fell in love with. And then, too, Cleage might’ve acknowledged the contradictions in the Nicodemians’ way of life. They are, after all, living on land taken from Native Americans, just like white folks. v

m @taadler OCTOBER 18, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 13

LONG RUN

Thu 10/18-Sat 10/20, 7:30 PM, the Dance Center of Columbia College, 1306 S. Michigan, 312-369-8330, dance.colum.edu, $30, $24 seniors, $10 students.

ARTS & CULTURE

THEATER

Haunted houses, a vampiric rabbit, two Frankensteins, and Freddy Krueger’s hotter, sadder brother

A roundup of 15 Halloween shows to thrill and chill you

By JULIA CLAUSEN

ove haunted houses but wish they had a plot? Join the action of these immersive performances instead. Inspired by an 1897 concert in the Paris Catacombs, LES INNOCENTS, by (Re)Discover Theatre, is a queer thriller that follows a composer on a quest for love through the land of the dead. Conjure spirits, face mortality, and help goodness prevail in this interactive experience. Through 11/4: Thu-Sun 8 PM, ASL-interpreted performance Fri 10/19, Preston Bradley Center, 941 W. Lawrence, 312-884-1733, rediscovertheatre.com, $30. Rough House Theater presents THE WALLS OF HARROW HOUSE, a truly harrowing performance created with puppetry and sound design. Visitors explore the home of an infamous Chicago architect and watch his horriﬁc story unfold. Through 11/3: Thu-Fri 8 and 9:30 PM; Sat 8, 9:30, and 11 PM, Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division, roughhousetheater.com, $25, $15 industry. Strawdog Theatre Company premieres

14 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 18, 2018

MASQUE MACABRE, an immersive theater experience inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Guests travel from room to room, following 14 stories of revenge and murder. You may need to see it multiple times to get the full experience. Through 10/31: Thu-Sat 7 and 9:30 PM, Sun 2 and 5 PM; also Mon 10/29Wed 10/31, 7 and 9:30 PM, Strawdog Theatre, 1802 W. Berenice, 773-644-1380, strawdog.org, $50, $40 seniors. To celebrate the centennial of Mary Shelley’s classic novel, four theater companies are putting their own spin on Frankenstein. Two are currently running through November: Remy Bumppo presents Shelley’s classic from the creature’s perspective (and Nick Sandys and Greg Matthew Anderson alternate in the roles of the doctor and the monster), while Lifeline Theatre turns Frankenstein Freudian and female. FRANKENSTEIN Through 11/17: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; also Wed 10/24, 10/31, and 11/14, 7:30 PM; and Sat 10/20, 11/3, and 11/17, 7:30 PM, Theater Wit,

1229 W. Belmont, 773-975-8150, remybumppo.org, $37.75-$62.75. FRANKENSTEIN Through 11/11: ThuFri 7:30 PM, Sat 4 and 8 PM, Sun 4 PM, Lifeline Theatre, 6912 N. Glenwood, 773-761-4477, lifelinetheatre.com, $40, $30 seniors, $30 students. For a show with material more lighthearted than reanimated corpses, Lifeline is performing BUNNICULA, the children’s Halloween staple about a rabbit who sucks the life out of vegetables. 10/20-11/25: Sat-Sun 11 AM and 1 PM, Lifeline Theatre, 6912 N. Glenwood, 773-761-4477, lifelinetheatre.com, $15. If you’re interested in the horror-comedy Chicago does best, go to the iO Theater. Two shows run every Wednesday: THE CAMPFIRE (10 PM), an evening of scary improvised storytelling, and THE MANSION SHOW (8 PM), a musical set in a haunted house in desperate need of repairs. Also playing at iO on Saturdays: GRAND GUIGNOL: BAD MILK and HOUSE LAFAYETTE (both 10:30 PM). Through 10/31: iO Theater, 1501 N. Kingsbury, 312-929-2401, ioimprov. com, $10-$14. Annoyance Theatre is hosting A WET DREAM ON ELM STREET, a musical about Freddy Krueger’s hot brother, and SPLATTER THEATER, a classic Chicago evening of hilariously gruesome deaths now in its 31st year. A WET DREAM ON ELM STREET Through 11/4: Sun 8 PM; SPLATTER THEATER Through 10/27: Sat 10:30 PM; also Wed 10/31, 8 PM, Annoyance Theatre, 851 W. Belmont, 773-697-9693, annoyancetheatre.com, $18-$20, $15 students. Another Chicago Halloween musical: GOLDEN GIRLS, THE LOST EPISODES: BEA AFRAID, which wonders, What would happen if Sophia were possessed by a demon? Through 11/2: Fri-Sat 10:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Tue 10/31-Fri 11/3, 7 PM, Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont, 773-327-5252, handbagproductions.org, $25. Not enough dancing zombies? Check out YOU’VE GOT RED ON YOU, the musical adaptation of Shaun of the Dead, about a man coasting through life . . . until the dead rise outside his local pub. Through 11/3: Thu-Fri and Sun 8 PM, Chief O’Neill’s Irish Pub, 3471 N. Elston, cowardlyscarecrow.com, $24.50. Finally, the Goodman Theatre will be bringing back its annual UNNATURAL WEIRD WONDERFEST (UWWFEST), chock-full of short plays by Chicago writers inspired by urban legends. Sat 10/27, 5 and 7 PM, Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, 312-443-3800, goodmantheatre.org, $20, $35 both performances. v

é BEN MCKEOWN

Splatter Theater é GILLIAN FRY

DANCE

Beyond words

Tere O’Connor’s Long Run explores the nature of consciousness through movement. “WHAT DOES DANCE DO BESIDES MAKE STORIES?” New York-based choreographer Tere O’Connor asks in Long Run, which proceeds in episodes enacted by subsets of his troupe of eight dancers, structured by scenes that accumulate without converging on a plot. “Is there a causality of some sort, or are we just looking at a choreographed randomness?” he muses. “Maybe every choreographer is going through some kind of drama of trying to control or hold on to time.” No ambition too small, in Long Run O’Connor aims to understand the nature of consciousness through movement. “I don’t start with an idea and translate that into dance. I start with dancing to locate the ideas,” he says. “I’m interested in complexity, a density of information. I think that’s really the answer to everything. Instead of polarized thinking and binary thought, complexity has potential to heal things.” Pointing out that narrative is produced by the elimination of potential (“Who’s going to become the main person? What’s going to happen? Are we going to save the city?”), O’Connor argues for the value of a work that remains open to possibility. “It’s a portal to exit language,” he suggests. “You ricochet from a memory to a thought, a reverie, a sensation of hunger—all those things have an order, but since we don’t honor that order, I’m trying to give it the property of structure and reason. What if we led the world in a way that came from consciousness and not good behavior and pragmatism?” In advance of the establishment of this new social order, he concedes, “Just say there’s free pizza every night.” —IRENE HSIAO

Black and Blue é SHEPSU AAKHU

between the tears. But at the root of it, this is a plaintive and heartfelt investigation of the ways that we distract ourselves from end-of-life issues in this country with medicine and happy talk rather than actually reckoning with them. Brian McKnight directed. —DMITRY SAMAROV EDGE OF LIFE Through 11/3: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM,

Sun 2 PM, Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport, 773-935-6875, athenaeumtheatre.org, $37, $27 students and seniors.

R Attack of the angry white men

but.

THEATER

Conflicted cops in Terror Town

Shepsu Aakhu’s words transcend a prosaic staging of Black and Blue.

In case you need a reminder of just how insightful and powerful a writer Chicago’s Shepsu Aakhu is, consider MPAACT’s staging of his new play about the multiply conflicted allegiances of two African-American Chicago police officers in the immediate aftermath of the Laquan McDonald video release. Even with a fundamentally misconceived production, the script’s intellectual rigor and visceral impact are unmistakable. Over a single day in the patch of South Shore known as Terror Town, officers Rabedeau and Sexton patrol with uncharacteristic tentativeness: it’s Rabedeau’s first day back after being shot nearly to death months ago as he attempted to talk down a man in midpsychotic break, and Sexton has arranged for any potentially traumatizing calls to be sent to other units. That leaves the partners ample time to mull and parse—in artfully constructed prose—the disastrous state of social, political, economic, and psychological affairs on the streets around them, all conspiring to turn Sexton heartless and Rabedeau hopeless. They’re so loquacious that a routine stop to clear loitering youth from a street corner turns into a ten-minute semipoetic disquisition on a century’s worth of psychosocial determinants of racial inequity. Like much of Aakhu’s script, it’s a rigorous, blistering spoken-word piece, far removed from cops talking on street corners. Trouble is, director Andrea J. Dymond treats everything as realistic dialogue, so little feels dramatically credible. But even with this disconnect, the surgical precision of Aakhu’s successively more unsettling set pieces carries the evening. —JUSTIN HAYFORD

BLACK AND BLUE Through 11/18: Thu-Sun 8 PM, Sun

3 PM, Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 661-373-3089, mpaact.org, $38, $28 students and seniors.

R Sister wives

Danai Gurira’s Eclipsed is a powerful declaration of hope. Though Danai Gurira may be best known for her performances in The Walking Dead, Black Panther, and Avengers: Infinity War, in Eclipsed, presented by Pegasus Theatre, she proves that her talents extend beyond acting to playwriting. The first play to premiere on Broadway with an all-black and female cast and creative team, Eclipsed follows the lives of four women forced into servitude as the “wives” of a commanding officer at the end of the Liberian civil war in 2003.

Maya V. Prentiss, Aja Singletary, Sola Thompson and Adhana Reid are all electrifying as the four young wives, each processing trauma in her own distinct way. Despite living a waking nightmare, this family of necessity finds unexpected joy and purpose as they struggle to persevere. Prentiss plays Helena, the heartbreakingly young eldest Wife Number One, with a lovely vulnerability, desperately establishing a sense of order for the others and herself. Thompson shows extraordinary range as the youngest and newest Wife Number Four, tumbling headfirst into a life beyond comprehension, wrestling with unimaginably heart-wrenching choices. Singletary delights as the hilarious Bessie, Wife Number Three, who brings unexpected levity to their circumstances. And Reid gives a powerful performance as Maima, Wife Number Two, determined to fight back against her persecution at any cost. War is tyranny, and the desperation for self-preservation brings terrible, unintended consequences. Shortly after the war ended, women in Liberia adopted the Golden Tulip Declaration, mandating that women participate in all governmental structures. Eclipsed is similarly a powerful declaration of hope.—SHERI FLANDERS ECLIPSED Through 11/4: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3

and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Chicago Dramatists, 773 N. Aberdeen, 773-878-8864, pegasustheatrechicago. org, $30, $25 seniors, $18 youth (13-21).

R Bottom of the ninth

Edge of Life offers a heartfelt investigation into the American way of death. Inglis Hall Productions presents the world premiere of Joel Z. Cornfield’s timely play about how Americans deal with death—or don’t. Dr. Jake Forest is a surgeon who’s going through a divorce, drinks too much, and is sleeping with Heather, one of the nurses at his hospital. When his high school coach, Bill Erickson, asks to be taken off his cancer meds and be allowed to die on his own terms, Forest begins to reassess many of his own life choices. Buzz Leer is the standout in a strong cast as the dying coach. He reminded me strongly of John Garfield, the classic tough guy in black-and-white movies. Hearing him read Forest the riot act made me ready to go out on the field and give it my all myself. His vulnerability as he tells those close to him it’s time to let him go is the heart of the whole piece. The circular set, periodically rotated lazy Susanstyle by two orderlies, effectively communicates both the passage of hours as well as the thin walls between hospital rooms. Cornfield manages to keep the heavy subject matter from becoming maudlin by throwing in enough gallows humor to make the audience laugh a little

Fun Harmless Warmachine is anything

It’s tempting to label Tom, the twentysomething protagonist in Fin Coe’s inventive, disturbing new play, as the quintessential disaffected Trumpian white male, fed up with a self-proclaimed progressive culture that offers him little but meaningless employment while indicting him for supposedly limitless privilege. But Coe is too smart a writer to trade in such a reductive trope. His Tom, a virtuoso gamer and indifferent insurance salesman, bristles, stews, and seethes because his daily life is “just fine”: comfortable, safe, predictable, indistinguishable from ten thousand others. In short, he’s pathetic. No wonder he falls in with the Order of the Sword, an online gaming cabal administered by charming and vaguely threatening Hunter, where he’s a revered star. But when his Order brothers learn his coworker Melissa once spurned his half-hearted advances, they unleash a torrent of unconscionable harassment on her, and Tom is forced to confront the fact that he’s found a home in a community rooted in his own worst impulses. Director James Fleming keeps Coe’s splintered scenes moving at a breakneck pace without compromising psychological nuance (although with many actors playing multiple roles it’s sometimes difficult to keep everyone straight). The cast rarely overplays scenes that invite emotional indulgence, making for a taut, engaging 100 minutes. As Tom, Daniel Chenard is charming, vulnerable, and witlessly unprincipled, a perfect destructive foil for open-hearted girlfriend Ekaterina, played to harrowing perfection by Ayanna Bria Bakari. Except for the implausible and unnecessary final scene, this New Colony premiere plumbs very unsettling depths. —JUSTIN HAYFORD FUN HARMLESS

WARMACHINE Through 11/4: Thu-Sat 7:30, Sun 3 PM, the Den Theater, 1331 N. Milwaukee, 773-413-0862, thenewcolony.org, $20.

Journey to hell

There may be a compelling play about the 1897 concert in the Paris Catacombs. Les Innocents is not it. (Re)discover Theatre’s self-serious one-act slog purports to be “inspired by a real concert that took place in the Paris Catacombs in 1897,” and I’ve no doubt there’s a compelling story to be excavated somewhere from that event. But, my God, this full-body-cringe-inducing work of theater cannot be it. Gui, a nonbinary composer on a deadline, descends into the skull-walled labyrinth below Paris to reunite with the soul of their recently deceased lover and reclaim the musical inspiration that was buried with her. While en route, the musician encounters a 90s-era-Jim Carreylevel-manic mapmaker and an anguished, howling, zombielike gang of spirits, each with regrets and a narrative of their own. Even under the most generous deﬁnition of “immersive,” Ann Kreitman’s production doesn’t make

ARTS & CULTURE

much of a case for why audiences need to trudge a lap around a row of paint-stamped crepe-paper walls, the jankiness of which is barely concealed by the Preston Bradley Center’s extreme low lighting. Once the audience is seated, the already slow pace brakes even further as each ghost bemoans its fate and interrogates Gui about their motivations for descending to the underworld. Given how short the show is, it’s remarkable how much of it is spent killing time. One highlight, for what it’s worth: a positive emphasis on queer and nonbinary casting. —DAN JAKES LES

INNOCENTS Through 11/4: Thu-Sun 8 PM, ASL-in-

terpreted performance Fri 10/19, Preston Bradley Center, 941 W. Lawrence, 312-884-1733, rediscovertheatre.com, $30.

R Good thing, tiny package

A small stage makes Mercury Theater’s Pippin great.

Even though this highly fictionalized 1972 musical, based on the life of the ne’er-do-well son of the eighth-century warrior king Charlemagne, was made for the Broadway stage—where it ran for 1,944 performances from October 23, 1972, to June 12, 1977—it transfers very gracefully to a considerably smaller cabaret space—namely the Venus Cabaret, recently carved out of a former Irish pub by the folks at Mercury Theater. In fact, as revealed in this revival, the show has a sweet intimacy about it that can get lost in the razzle-dazzle of a big production. On the large stage, the show’s protagonist can sometimes feel like an unworthy fool, a mere nonentity, lost in a world of larger-than-life historical figures. On a smaller stage his ongoing existential crisis—he dreams of doing something extraordinary but never manages to, despite his myriad family connections—feels more relatable. The same holds true for Stephen Schwartz’s sweet, light, poppy tunes: they don’t have to work so hard to fill the room. Director L. Walter Stearns uses the space well. Large scenes never feel crammed in, and the smaller scenes are more moving than I remember from past, larger productions of this show. Stearns’s casting is strong. Koray Tarhan easily wins us over as Pippin. From the moment the story begins we are on his side; his pain is our pain. And even the show’s choreography—created on Broadway by the show’s legendary director, Bob Fosse—works on the tiny stage, thanks to choreographer Brenda Didier. —JACK HELBIG PIPPIN Through 12/16:

Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2:30 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; also Wed 7:30 after 11/28, Mercury Theater Chicago, 3745 N. Southport, 773-325-1700, mercurytheaterchicago.com, $65, $60 seniors.

Botox Queen

WaistWatchers could use an update—and a female writer.

Created in 2007 by Alan Jacobsen, a Floridian known for manufacturing cruise-ship entertainment, this 90-minute musical feels like just that—a contrived cruise-ship show. Packed to the gills with Weird Al-style parody songs, the one-act follows four middle-aged women trying to lose weight and navigate their relationships at Cook’s Women’s Gym. One of those women is played by Martha Wash, the recording artist best known for her vocals in “It’s Raining Men” and “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now),” and her presence is one of the only exciting parts of this production. Well, until she leaves bB the cast on October 28.

OCTOBER 18, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 15

ARTS & CULTURE Every memory has a soundtrack of its own.

Edge of Life é LIZ LAUREN

Lady in

Denmark By Dael Orlandersmith Directed by Chay Yew

After the death of her husband, a Danish American woman ﬁnds solace in the hauntingly beautiful music of their favorite singer, Billie Holiday. A journey through the couple’s time together—from the smoky jazz clubs of post-war Copenhagen, to the home they shared in present-day Chicago—Lady in Denmark is a passionate reﬂection on life and love.

OCTOBER 19 – NOVEMBER 18 312.443.3800 | GoodmanTheatre.org GROUPS OF 10+ ONLY: 312.443.3820

Contributing Sponsor

Lead Support of New Play Development

16 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 18, 2018

« The rest of the cast are capable singers, and their vocals are generally strong, but they’ve been given dated, one-dimensional material. Jacobsen’s book and lyrics attempt to cover every issue that can possibly affect the stereotypical middle-aged woman, including weight loss, plastic surgery, unplanned pregnancy, and remaining desirable to a husband. Songs like “Botox Queen” (set to ABBA’s “Dancing Queen”) and other show-tune spoofs offer little in the way of clever turns of phrase, leaving the cast to rely on overt physical comedy (a definite talent of Sarah Godwin) and over-the-top props to get laughs. There are plenty of opportunities throughout the show for audience members to dance— and burn calories!—something many enjoyed on the night I attended. But the advertised “inspiration” does not emanate from these cartoonish characters. The script could benefit from both an update for today’s sensibilities and a female perspective. —MARISSA OBERLANDER WAISTWATCHERS THE MUSICAL Through

12/30: Wed 7:30, Thu 2 and 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, Royal George Theatre, 1641 N. Halsted, 312-988-9000, waistwatchersthemusical. com, $45-$65.

Haunted mansion

The puppets are the best reason to venture within The Walls of Harrow House. The basement of the Chopin Theatre has been host to some of the most extraordinary immersive theater experiences in Chicago, from David Cromer’s intimate Our Town to Sean Graney’s promenade stagings of Gilbert and Sullivan to Nathan Allen’s living arcade The Last Defender. Rough House’s dramatic, puppet-ﬁlled walk-through haunted house is a formidable addition to the venue’s storied history, even if the ﬁnal product isn’t much more substantial than the sum of its parts. A deranged architect welcomes investors to tour the renovated Harrow House property, inspired by some of the spookier designs of Frank Lloyd Wright. As audiences wander down black scrim hallways, a dozen performers operate one-, two-, and three-person puppets and play a variety of lifesize characters, sentient limbs and gnarly, wicked The Thing-style amalgamations of human and monster. Lead puppet designer Grace Needlman’s macabre creations really are something to behold; part of the fun during the preshow is watching arriving audience members do double takes at the

“person” standing next to them. Not unlike David H. Bell’s long-running interactive production of Southern Gothic at Windy City Playhouse, Harrow House’s story, by Mark Maxwell and Claire Saxe, is supposed to be inferred piecemeal by moseying around the set, playing with light boxes and tape recorders and observing characters interact. Compared to the puppets, some of the interactive elements feel chintzy, and even at a scant 60-minute running time, there’s not quite enough here to elevate director Mike Oleon’s show from decent PG-rated haunted house to full theatrical production. But as an exercise in design, Rough House has established one hell of an artistic point of view. —DAN JAKES THE WALLS OF HARROW

HOUSE Through 11/3: Thu-Fri 8 and 9:30 PM; Sat 8, 9:30, and 11 PM, Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division, roughhousetheater.com, $25, $15 industry.

when you thought you’d R Just recovered from the Kavanaugh hearings

Warrior Class examines the toxic eﬀects of longburied sexual harassment. The Comrades theater company delivers a very wellacted staging of Kenneth Lin’s crisp political drama. It’s the story of Chinese-American politician Julius Lee (Ben Veatch), a New York state assemblyman whose idealism, intelligence, oratorical skills, and personal biography (practicing Christian, U.S. Marine veteran, family man) suggest he has a bright future on the national stage— until his patron, political consultant Nathan Berkshire (Scott Olson), uncovers a toxic relationship dating back to Julius’s college days. When Julius’s ex-girlfriend, Holly Eames (Alison Plott), accuses him of having sexually harassed her 20 years earlier, Nathan must work out a deal to protect his protege. Lin’s crackling dialogue and insight into the ambiguities of human nature make this 80-minute oneact compelling and thought-provoking entertainment. Under Carol Ann Tan’s direction, it proves especially timely now in the context of the #MeToo movement and the recent furor surrounding Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court. —ALBERT WILLIAMS WARRIOR CLASS Through 11/11: Thu-Sat 8

PM, Sun 3 PM, Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 773-312-3964, the-comrades.com, $20. v

SHE WANTS IT: DESIRE, POWER, AND TOPPLING THE PATRIARCHY

By Jill Soloway (Crown Archetype). Reading Thu 10/18, 7 PM, Chicago Waldorf School, 5200 N. Ashland, 7 PM, 773-769-9299, womenandchildrenfirst.com, $30 (includes copy of the book).

é JESSIE CHAMBERLIN

ARTS & CULTURE

American dads get to have, what would that have been like for me to have as a parent. I talk about this idea of feminist arguing as a sport I wish I could be watching. What would it be like if we could all go to stadiums and watch Roxane Gay and Jessica Valenti have an argument about consent and we’re all cheering from the stands?”

Which is why at the Chicago stop on their book tour at Women and Children First, Soloway will be hosting what they lovingly call “fantasy feminist arguments” along with their sister Faith, mother Elaine, comedian Hannah Gadsby, intersex activist and artist Pidgeon Pagonis, and Annoyance Theatre ensemble member Claudia Martinez. While some of these conversations may be difficult, being able to laugh through it all is a powerful priority. Soloway’s tour is set on mobilizing their audience’s collective rage. Arguing online isn’t just counterproductive, they believe, it can also do more harm than good because of the toxicity that surrounds it, often at the expense of those most vulnerable who have to confront it every minute on social media. But when people go out into the world to have these conversations, it can form a sense of community and solidarity that’s vital in times of hopelessness. v

m @dykediscourse

LIT

Jill Soloway wants you to stop arguing with people online

Photos: Ben McKeown

The Transparent creator comes home to Chicago to demonstrate how to do it in person. By CODY CORRALL

sk Jill Soloway how they’re doing and they respond with a heavy sigh, “The world is a terrible place.” It’s hard not to feel this way, as Soloway writes in their new memoir, She Wants It: Desire, Power, and Toppling the Patriarchy, because it seems that the world has continuously turned its back on women, people of color, queer and transgender and disabled people, and survivors of sexual violence. It’s easy to succumb to the fear and the pain that comes with inequality. But for Soloway, who was a comedian in Chicago before they became the Emmy Award-winning creator of Amazon Video’s Transparent, those hard-to-deal-with emotions can fuel much-needed conversations and incite action against the patriarchy. Soloway ﬁrmly believes, however, that these conversations shouldn’t happen on Twitter. “I’m really interested in the uncomfortable

places, the boundaries, the places where an intersectional power movement [manifests],” Soloway says. “We need to try and ask ourselves these questions about privilege, about gender, about race, and live in these rooms together instead of online so that we can push through whatever the dead ends are. They are stopping us from being able to come up with a cohesive message of power to take on the right. My hope is that out of this pain and anger will form a bigger intersectional power movement.” Soloway tries to imagine a different kind of argument—one that is both more productive and enjoyable. “There’s a part in the book,” Soloway says, “where I talk about male privilege and what would be the equivalent of sitting around watching the football game on Sundays in my underwear with my family. Whatever it is

TERE O’CONNOR DANCE October 18–20, 2018 7:30 p.m.

TICKETS $30 REGULAR $24 SENIORS $10 STUDENTS SUBSCRIBE AND SAVE 25% dance.colum.edu

OCTOBER 18, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 17

18 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 18, 2018

Ã© ANYA DAVIDSON

OCTOBER 18, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 19

TIME BEING TATTOO

ARTS & CULTURE

Opening party Sun 10/21, 7-11 PM, 2409 W. Hirsch, timebeingtattoo.com. F

Emily Kempf, Keara McGraw, and Sema Graham; tattoo by Emily Kempf é ALEXA VISCIUS; COURTESY THE ARTIST

VISUAL ART

‘Permanent markings on impermanent vessels’ Time Being Tattoo brings its founders’ DIY spirit to a professional setting. By ANNA WHITE

year and a half ago, I visited Emily Kempf’s home in Pilsen to interview her about her then-active cassette label Cool Girl Tapes. The walls of her living room were papered with black-and-white ink drawings of goblets and flowers and four-eyed women— illustrations that looked like they belonged in a deck of tarot cards. Kempf explained that the sketches decorating her walls were tattoo designs—she had begun using her home as a makeshift tattoo studio, hand-poking her art onto friends and a small client base familiar with her work through Instagram. Kempf is still tattooing, but no longer from her living room: with Keara McGraw and Sema Graham, she opened up Time Being Tattoo last month, an appointment-only studio in Humboldt Park. Graham, Kempf and McGraw are all self-

20 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 18, 2018

taught, and are part of a recent generation of tattoo artists who have used Instagram to build a network of clients rather than going through a formal apprenticeship and then joining an established tattoo shop. All three founders have worked primarily out of private studios up until this point, but they wanted to open a brick-and-mortar shop to provide clients with a legal and safe environment. The three artists initially knew of one another’s work through Instagram. Graham and McGraw met for the ﬁrst time in April, when Graham gave McGraw a tattoo. They connected over their shared views on tattoo culture, and they began dreaming up plans to open a shop together. Kempf was brought on in June after she tattooed McGraw and they clicked, and the three secured the storefront for Time Being within weeks—everything fell into place

remarkably quickly. “We were all just ready,” says Kempf. “I feel like we were all just on the same path.” All three founders share a belief that tattooing their art onto another individual is a powerful act, and one they should honor. “I’m definitely really into the energy exchange between me and the person I’m tattooing,” says Kempf. “It’s not a weird transaction, and I don’t take it for granted.” The shop’s name is a reference to Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being. “In that book [Ozeki] kind of treats ‘time being’ like a personhood, like a noun,” says McGraw. “We as humans are time beings, we exist in time, and I kind of like the way that relates to tattooing.” Her Instagram bio expands on this view of the temporal nature of tattoo art and the quasi-spiritual way the shop’s founders all

view their practice: “permanent markings on impermanent vessels.” Though Graham, Kempf, and McGraw respect the tattoo community in Chicago, they feel that tattoo shops can often feel unapproachable to women and queer individuals. “Something that’s supposed to be a radical counterculture thing has become a boys’ club,” says Graham. All three artists can relate an experience within the tattoo world where they have felt uncomfortable, whether it’s being sexualized by a man tattooing them or condescension from professionals when they’ve self-identifed as home tattoo artists. Time Being Tattoo models itself after other spaces in Chicago, such as Black Oak Tattoo, that transcend the hypermasculinity of many tattoo shops. It’s meant to be a space where anyone can feel comfortable and marginalized people can feel seen. This is demonstrated through the shop’s sign-in forms, which ask for details such as clients’ preferred pronouns but also reassure customers that disclosing personal information is optional. “We want people to feel safe,” says McGraw. “We want people to feel like their existence is respected.” v

m @annaclaire

THE OATH sss

ARTS & CULTURE

Directed by Ike Barinholtz. R, 93 min.

The Oath

Whitney Wasson é SAFESPACE CHICAGO

COMEDY

No drink minimum

The new variety show Serenity Now! provides a sober space in a booze-fueled industry. By BRIANNA WELLEN

he more you drink, the funnier we are!” Stand-up Whitney Wasson admits she’s said this and other throwaway lines onstage in an attempt to get crowds to buy another beer at a show. It’s at the bar, she says, where most comedy venues make their money, not to mention where most comics tend to hang out while waiting for stage time. But now two years sober, Wasson is working to create a different environment for other performers in recovery from drugs and alcohol. Serenity Now! is a variety show featuring all-sober artists performing for a completely sober audience. Stand-up Shannon Noll headlines the debut at the Crowd Theater on Saturday, October 20, at 10 PM, specifically scheduled to give nondrinkers a place to be at an often very booze-filled time. Wasson drew from sober performers she already knew and issued an open call for sober performers to put together the lineup, which includes musician Nire Nah, improvisor Josh Levine, and stand-up Katie Sirles. Wasson was already a heavy drinker when she started her comedy career in Fayetteville, Arkansas, five years ago. When she moved to Chicago in 2016 to continue pursuing stand-up, she drank more. “I sort of wore how dysfunctional I was as a badge of honor,” she says. “I feel like artists tend to do that. It’s this big romantic idea that you have to be this towering tragic figure to write anything—to do anything worthwhile, you’re in turmoil. That’s an idea that I really had to work on shedding since I got sober.” There wasn’t a major incident that caused Wasson to stop drinking—she was still always able to get onstage and perform.

SERENITY NOW!

Sat 10/20, 10 PM, Crowd Theater, 3935 N. Broadway, thecrowdtheater.com, $10 (ticket includes sparkling water).

Whether or not she remembered what she said was another story. She says her jokes are better now that she has a clear head, gets plenty of rest, and can be present in her performance. And she doesn’t shy away from talking about her sobriety onstage, something that has connected her to a community of other comics who are in recovery. “I wanted to know that there were sober people who could maintain sobriety, were funny, were getting opportunities, and I think most of all just were able to exist in the otherwise murky, bad social environment that is stand-up comedy,” Wasson says. “It’s a speciﬁc type of masochism that drives you to do it anyway. Comedy can sometimes be the antithesis of recovery.” Wasson’s ultimate dream is to create a space that has the same lived-in social atmosphere as a bar but is completely booze free. In the meantime, she asks that comedy venues offer more soft drink options and alternatives to the age-old policies built into the industry, like the two-drink minimum for audience members or paying performers with drink tickets. She’ll continue doing her part as a comedy producer, possibly by turning Serenity Now! into an ongoing series. “I’m trying to come at it in a really positive way like, if you build it they will come,” Wasson says. “I hope I can create an environment that inspires people to think that it’s possible to be a sober artist.” v

m @BriannaWellen

MOVIES

Which side are you on?

Ike Barinholtz’s political satire The Oath is, above all, a provocation. By BEN SACHS

he Oath, the writing and directing debut of comic actor Ike Barinholtz, serves as a reminder that the suppression of dissent is a step toward authoritarianism. Moreover, it argues unsubtly that this reminder is most timely for U.S. audiences. Barinholtz never calls out Donald Trump or the Republican Party by name, but he’s clearly targeting the authoritarian leanings of both. The film is all but deﬁned by its anger at the Trump regime—making it an informative document of the era, regardless of its artistic quality—and one thing that’s admirable about The Oath is that Barinholtz never apologizes for this. He doesn’t try to make the antiauthoritarian characters seem noble, nor does he spend much time proposing solutions to the dangers of Trumpism in particular or authoritarianism in general. What Barinholtz does is speak through two popular genres, comedy and horror, to appeal directly to American spectators, acknowledging their anger and encouraging them to act on it constructively. The movie announces its urgency from the start; it spends little time on exposition. The ssss EXCELLENT

sss GOOD

opening scene finds an upper-middle-class American couple, Chris (Barinholtz) and Kai (Tiffany Haddish), learning from TV news that a ﬁctional president has introduced a new “Patriot’s Oath” he wants wants every U.S. citizen to sign within the next ten months. By signing it, citizens declare loyalty to the president and promise to report anyone who critiques him. A spokesperson for the government says that signing the oath isn’t legally required but that those who do will receive tax breaks and other, unspecified benefits. Barinholtz doesn’t establish the political goals of the administration apart from getting everyone to sign the oath, but one can assume that they’re a lot like Trump’s—that is, amassing as much power as possible and wielding it cruelly over its opponents. It’s indicative of the fictional regime’s cruelty that it sets the deadline for signing as the day after Thanksgiving, thereby transforming a time for togetherness into one of self-interest and dread. (It’s practically Grinch-like.) Chris and Kai agree not to sign the oath, laugh off the president, and conclude the evening by making love. Barinholtz then J

ss AVERAGE

s POOR

•

WORTHLESS

OCTOBER 18, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 21

ARTS & CULTURE

EARLY WARNINGS NEVER MISS A SHOW AGAIN

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THE BIG BAD FOX AND OTHER TALES

THE GUILTY Oct 19 - 25

Oct 19 - Nov 1

Fri., 10/19 at 2:15 & 8 pm; Sat., 10/20 at 3 & 6:30 pm; Sun., 10/21 at 5 pm; Mon., 10/22 at 8 pm; Tue., 10/23 at 6 pm; Wed., 10/24 at 6 pm; Thu., 10/25 at 8:15 pm

ENGLISH Fri., 10/19 at 6 pm; Sun., 10/21 at 3:15 pm; Tue., 10/23 at 7:45 pm; Wed., 10/24 at 6 pm FRENCH WITH SUBTITLES Fri., 10/19 at 4 pm; Sat., 10/20 at 4:45 pm; Mon., 10/22 at 6 pm; Thu., 10/25 at 8:15 pm SEE WEBSITE FOR SHOWTIMES THRU 11/1 “Wacky, heartwarming and wise…equal parts Tex Avery and Dr. Seuss, with a bit of Adult Swim.” — Hollywood Reporter

“Stunning Danish thriller...tense, continually surprising.” — RogerEbert.com

OCT 19 - 25 • SCOTTY AND THE SECRET HISTORY OF HOLLYWOOD BUY TICKETS NOW

22 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 18, 2018

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continued from 21 cuts to ten months later. It’s the week before Thanksgiving and the liberal couple has invited Chris’s largely conservative family to spend the holiday at their suburban home. The extended family has pledged not to talk about politics when they’re together, something Chris—an arrogant hothead who compulsively checks his cell phone for political updates— finds difficult to do. A natural comedian, Barinholtz scores plenty of laughs from Chris’s hypersensitive, self-righteous behavior (in a recent interview with the website Collider, the filmmaker said he’d be a bad satirist if he didn’t). This communicates the message—and one of The Oath’s most perceptive observations—that certain left-wing types are as responsible as their right-wing counterparts for the erosion of American political discourse. In presenting the family reunion through Chris’s high-strung perspective, Barinholtz conveys the common frustration over our culture’s current inability to discuss politics politely. The Oath doesn’t address the American right’s efforts to deligitimize its opponents through lies, hateful rhetoric, and outright voter suppression (not to mention the dilemma of how one responds politely to such tactics); Barinholtz is more concerned with how these efforts affect everyday life. In three significant early scenes, Chris observes heated confrontations in his neighborhood that nearly break out into violence: one on a suburban street corner, another in a supermarket, and a third in a restaurant. It’s only in the last of these confrontations that the aggressor reveals his anger to be politically motivated, yelling at a group of liberal restaurant patrons for being unpatriotic. Still, all of these scenes are alarming (Barinholtz pointedly drops his satirical tone when they occur), as they dramatize a society on the verge of breakdown. This sense of impending chaos carries over to Chris’s interactions with his parents, younger brother, and the younger brother’s girlfriend, all of whom support the president and admit to signing the oath. The family’s efforts to ignore the social climate can be funny, though the situation is upsetting as well—by denying what’s going on beyond their immediate vicinity, the family submits to self-censorship, virtually suppressing their identities in the process. With its frequent one-liners and bland, sunny aesthetic, the first half of The Oath feels a bit like a TV sitcom, and this approach instills a sense of complacency in the audience; one can laugh at the dysfunctional family even when they descend into arguments. Chris

breaks the family pledge big time during Thanksgiving dinner, lashing out both at the conservative members, who shrug off news of the violent suppression of an anti-government demonstration in another city, and his liberal sister and brother-in-law, who admit to having signed the oath out of fear of being ostracized. Barinholtz can’t resist inserting jokes even into this scene (and the cast, with its superb comic timing, delivers them expertly), but they’re overwhelmed by his character’s anger, which carries traces of betrayal and powerlessness. The dark tone sets the stage for the nightmare that follows, as The Oath transforms into a political horror movie. The day after Thanksgiving, two volunteer officers from something called the Citizens’ Protection Unit show up at Chris and Kai’s house and ask to interrogate Chris for supposedly preventing someone from signing the Patriot’s Oath. Chris refuses to comply, and the situation escalates scarily. Without revealing too much, I’ll say that every member of the family is forced to decide whether they really support the government unconditionally or whether they believe in resisting it to protect a relative from cruel, unconstitutional treatment. Their moral dilemma takes on surprising, genuine weight and blows a hole through the film’s sitcomlike veneer. Barinholtz savvily manages the turn from comedy to horror, gradually giving pressing expression to the fear of authoritarianism underlying much anti-Trump sentiment. No one ever compares the CPU officers to members of the Gestapo, nor do they have to; both officers—one eerily calm, the other a loose cannon—inspire this association through their insistence with and contempt for everyone around them. I found The Oath to conclude on an unsatisfying note, as Barinholtz wraps up his concerns far too neatly; the film, up to this point, thrives on the sweepingness of its anger and fear. Yet Barinholtz seems to recognize this too. The Oath is above all a provocation—it forces viewers to take sides and articulate what’s bothering them in American life. The ending is basically an exhortation to the audience not just to continue the film’s arguments outside the theater, but to strive for a more civil and pluralistic culture in which cautionary tales like The Oath aren’t necessary. Leaving the film, I was reminded of the final title card of a classic provocation of American cinema, Samuel Fuller’s Run of the Arrow (1957): “The end of the Story can only be written by you!” v

m @1bsachs

LATE NIGHT AT THE LOGAN PRESENTS

Get showtimes at chicagoreader.com/movies.

ARTS & CULTURE The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales

306 Hollywood

Tasked with clearing out their late grandmother’s house in Hillside, New Jersey, siblings Elan and Jonathan Bogarín approach the chore as if they were archeologists, sorting through the woman’s possessions to see what they reveal about middle-class Jewish-American life from the mid- to late-20th century. This experimental documentary (which the siblings also directed) traces their progress in both practical and philosophical terms, with fun tableaux of the grandmother’s stuﬀ and provocative interviews with various professionals (a physicist, a historian, an archivist) who muse on what the Bogaríns’ endeavor might teach us about civilization. The siblings exhibit as much curiosity about cinematic form as they do about their family history; the ﬁlm is a surprising melange of found footage, playful montages, choreographed routines, and dramatic reenactments. Not all of the devices work (some passages border on cloying), but on the whole this evokes a pleasant sense of wonder about everyday life. —BEN SACHS 94 min. Fri 10/19, 7 and 9 PM; Sat 10/20, 3, 5, 7, and 9 PM; Sun 10/21, 1, 3, 5, and 7 PM; Mon 10/22-Thu 10/25, 7 and 9 PM. Facets Cinematheque

Bad Times at the El Royale

In what is perhaps the most insufferable Tarantino knockoff since the 90s, writer-director Drew Goddard (The Cabin in the Woods) blatantly invokes the baroque pulp plotting of Reservoir Dogs and the portentous style of The Hateful Eight, throwing in lots of familiar Tarantino-style sadism for good measure. What’s missing are the qualities that can make Tarantino’s movies pleasurable—his humor, intricate dialogue, and evident love of film history. This takes place sometime during the Nixon administration in a hotel straddling the Nevada-California border; a fortune in stolen money lies hidden in one of the rooms. Several strangers, all of them harboring dark secrets, show up one day, and by that night the place is a bloodbath. Goddard shows little interest in history and ethics (as Tarantino has shown in his films from Inglourious Basterds on); all he seems to care about is violence and kitsch. Bad times indeed. With Jeff Bridges, Cynthia Erivo, Dakota Johnson, Jon Hamm, and Chris Hemsworth. —BEN SACHS R, 141 min. AMC Dine-In Theatres Block 37, Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14 Theaters, City North 14, River East 21, Showplace ICON, Webster Place 11

Beautiful Boy

Refreshingly, there are few calls to a higher power in this searing, fact-based chronicle of a horriﬁc

descent into hard drugs. Instead, in their deft adaptation of two best-selling books, writer-director Felix Van Groeningen (The Broken Circle Breakdown) and his cowriter, Luke Davies (a former heroin user who went on to pen the Oscar-nominated Lion), help remove the stigma of addiction by focusing on the neuroscience of dependency. Steve Carell plays New York Times and Rolling Stone journalist David Sheﬀ (author of the eponymous memoir), and Timothée Chalamet is his gifted teenage son, Nic Sheﬀ (author of his own memoir, Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines), a sensitive lad whose initially casual drug use morphs into a toxic cycle of lies, guilt, recrimination, and lawlessness. The leads are superb, buoyed by Amy Ryan as Nic’s mom, Maura Tierney as his stepmother, and LisaGay Hamilton in a moving cameo as a parent whose unconditional love couldn’t save her child. —ANDREA GRONVALL R, 120 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark’s Century Centre, River East 21

Big Bad Fox and Other R The Tales Benjamin Renner and Patrick Imbert, who worked on the memorable storybook adaptation Ernest & Celestine (2012), directed this French animated feature, which shares the earlier film’s gentle tone and inclusive humor. The artisanal 2-D animation is refreshingly simple compared with most recent animated fare—the filmmakers don’t try to impress viewers with complicated, extraneous details, but focus on storytelling and character design. Likewise, the comedy doesn’t rely on pop-culture references or pointless innuendos, but rather sight gags and intercharacter patter reminiscent of vaudeville routines and classic Looney Tunes. This film consists of three short stories that take place around a farm; the second and best, about a nebbishy fox who inadvertently becomes the adopted parent to three baby chicks, epitomizes the film’s winning message of the universal need for companionship. This is ideal viewing for young children, though animation fans of all ages should find much to admire. —BEN SACHS G, 83 min. In French with subtitles: Fri 10/19, 4 PM; Sat 10/20, 4:45 PM; Mon 10/22, 6 PM; Thu 10/25, 8:15 PM; Fri 10/26, 6 PM; Sat 10/27, 3 PM; Sun 10/28, 5 PM; Mon 10/29, 6 PM; and Thu 11/1, 8:15 PM. In dubbed English: Fri 10/19, 6 PM; Sun 10/21 3:15 PM; Tue 10/23, 7:45 PM; Wed 10/24, 6 PM; Fri 10/26, 2 PM; Sat 10/27, 6:30 PM; Sun 10/28, 1:30 PM; and Wed 10/31, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center

First Man

Damien Chazelle is an enthusiastic, visually expressive ﬁlmmaker with practically nothing of interest to say about the human experience—his characterizations are

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This Danish potboiler is organized around a few nimbly executed plot twists, and like many similarly designed thrillers, it leaves the audience with little to think about once all the surprises have been revealed. It begins when a policeman working in an emergency call center finds himself on the line with a woman who’s been abducted by her estranged husband; the couple is on the road, forcing the cop to use his wits (and a wealth of surveillance technology) to track them down. The film takes place entirely in the call center, and the cop is often the only person onscreen. The premise—with its emphasis on confinement and solitude—cries out for the squarish Academy ratio, but director Gustav Möller shot this in wide-screen for no good reason; the images, all but defined by their wasted space, tend to slacken the tension engendered by the narrative. In Danish with subtitles. —BEN SACHS 88 min. Fri 10/19, 2:15 and 8 PM; Sat 10/20, 3 and 6:30 PM; Sun 10/21, 5 PM; Mon 10/22, 8 PM; Tue 10/23, 6 PM; Wed 10/24, 6 PM; and Thu 10/25, 8:15 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center

R The Hate U Give

Intelligently scripted by Audrey Wells and sensitively directed by George Tillman Jr. (Soul Food), this adaptation of Angie Thomas’s acclaimed young-adult novel merits comparison with Robert Mulligan’s film of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) in its nuanced consideration of delicate social issues from a young person’s perspective. A 16-year-old black girl from a poor, inner-city neighborhood attending a private (and largely white) suburban high school reconsiders her place in the world after one of her friends, also black, is shot dead by a white police officer. The premise provides a framework for all sorts of valuable social observations—about race, police brutality, and the interconnected problems of poverty and violence that have long plagued America’s cities—and, remarkably, none of them feel forced; the filmmakers understand their characters so thoroughly that the insights seem to grow organically from their experiences. This is American studio filmmaking at its finest. With Amandla Stenberg, Regina Hall, Common, and Russell Hornsby. —BEN SACHS PG-13, 132 min. AMC Dine-In Theatres Block 37, Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14 Theaters, City North 14, River East 21, Showplace 14 Galewood Crossings, Showplace ICON, Webster Place 11

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MOVIES

at once trite and overstated. This biopic about Neil Armstrong, set between 1961 and ’69, displays as much flair as Whiplash and La La Land, successfully transposing the style of those movies to a much larger canvas (the moon-landing sequence, shot with IMAX cameras, is particularly stunning), yet the interpersonal drama is generally sketchy, and most of the human subjects come off as two-dimensional. The film’s greatest shortcoming is that Armstrong never emerges as a compelling figure. Like all of Chazelle’s protagonists to date, he’s smart, ambitious, and emotionally dull—the only thing that seems to stand in the way of his being a perfect person is his repressive nature, but even this doesn’t register as much of a hurdle. With Ryan Gosling (as Armstrong), Claire Foy, Jason Clarke, and Kyle Chandler. —BEN SACHS PG-13, 141 min. AMC Dine-In Theatres Block 37, Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14 Theaters, City North 14, Logan, River East 21, Showplace ICON, Webster Place 11

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OCTOBER 18, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 23

QUEEN KEY

DEMANDS WHAT SHE WANTS—AND THAT MATTERS THE CHICAGO RAPPER’S OUTSIZE CONFIDENCE SENDS A MESSAGE OF SUPPORT TO BLACK WOMEN WHO KNOW THE ODDS ARE STACKED AGAINST THEM. The BLOCK BEAT BY

Words BY TIFFANY WALDEN

24 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 18, 2018

At least knock ﬁrst! é MORGAN ELISE JOHNSON

Queen Key in her cousins’ bedroom in Blue Island, where she used to write her songs é MORGAN ELISE JOHNSON

“S

he’ll kick us out. She’ll come down here and make songs, just tell us to leave,” says Aniya Marie Abrams, Queen Key’s 15-year-old cousin. Around three years before Queen released her debut mixtape, Your Highness, and around five before this summer’s EP Eat My Pussy, the aspiring rapper had bumped heads with her mom and moved out, living instead at Aniya’s house— where she used to take over their shared bedroom to write. Some things don’t change, and on an unseasonably chilly Thursday evening in August, Queen is doing it again—despite the glittery pink sign on the door reading “Do not buss

in my room!” Aniya leans against the dresser year at Homewood-Flossmoor, she started while Queen sits on the edge of the bottom living at the two-story house Aniya’s family bunk, slamming a large cheese from Italian has in Blue Island. Fiesta Pizzeria, and they reminisce about the “I’m grateful as fuck that I was able to come years they spent as two of the three kids in here,” Queen says. “I had the regular thinking that room. space that I needed and freedom and just op“We couldn’t be down here, like this is her portunity to literally think, ’cause that’s all it room,” Aniya says. Back then, they didn’t was about. That’s all I really wanted to do, like, have a bunk bed—only a queen-size bed and at my mama’s house and shit. Just smoke and a twin-size bed. When Queen took the queen, think. Just do me.” Aniya and her little brother shared the twin— When the Block Beat first met Queen Key, Queen was a wild sleeper, Aniya says. “It was last November in River West recording studio real hectic. We didn’t have At the Stu, she could barely nothing to ourselves,” she stop laughing between her adds. “She’d give us $2 if we sentences. We’d just talked gave her a massage.” about her in an episode of our G HERBO, Queen laughs mischiemusic video series the ForeSOUTHSIDE, vously, ﬂashing her signature cast, and she’d ripped it and QUEEN KEY Wed 11/21, 8 PM, the dimples. “Damn. I did use to posted it on her Instagram Forge, 22 W. Cass kick y’all niggas out of y’all page—in that installment, St., Joliet, $35-$105, shit,” she admits. “But that’s hosts Rome J and Morgan all-ages just because when I write my Elise Johnson discuss how songs, I really do it in private.” Queen always has the upper Before transferring to Eihand in her songs, never senhower High in Blue Island, crying about what some man a south suburb a couple miles outside Chica- has done to her. In the studio, she played her go, Queen attended Homewood-Flossmoor 2017 single “Pass My Blunt” and a forthcoming about ten miles farther south, where she and track that she thought about naming either her friends would get high and freestyle. “We “Gangin” or (in a nod to a line from one of her all came to the conclusion I was raw as fuck,” favorite movies, 1999’s The Wood) “Mackin & she says. Hangin.” She even rapped along to the new But her mother wasn’t feeling that lifestyle. song on Instagram Live to give her fans a taste. She and Queen fought, and her mom suggest“I was taught the same thing everybody else ed she move to her dad’s house in Wisconsin. was taught in this world—to just be regular,” But Queen wasn’t going. During her junior Queen said. As kids, she explained, we’re J

OCTOBER 18, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 25

continued from 25

all force-fed the same bullshit: stay in line and don’t talk back. “At H-F or just in life, period, I just follow my own rules,” she said. “I was always tardy. Always absent. Always ditching. Always whatever.” Other people’s rules have never worked for Queen Key. Born Ke’Asha Marie McClure, she was kicked out of preschool for being too smart—and that’s “smart” the way a black granny uses it, when she raises her eyebrow at a kid who challenges everything a grownup says. On the day of our August interview, Queen’s friends are supposed to bring her clothes for our photo shoot. When we arrive, she’s dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt, still waiting for those friends to show up. Queen insists on having everything just so—including her outﬁt—in order to be photographed. She smokes weed to pass the time, and when it becomes clear that her friends aren’t going to arrive, she lets us take about two minutes’

Queen (right) and her cousin Aniya é QURISTAL LOPEZ

worth of photos on the back porch. Queen seems apprehensive, even annoyed—not as lighthearted and playful as she was in the studio. She doesn’t have the clothes she wants, and we know she doesn’t want to settle for pictures in her sweats. With the sun going down, it’s getting colder. Eventually she says, quietly and forcefully, “We’ll do the interview now.” Queen is unapologetic about her feelings and about what she wants. That’s why so many black girls, teens, and women rock with her. “That’s why I’m so welcoming to my fans, because it’s like I understand them,” she says. “I see me when I see them, because I’m a little black girl. I was a little black girl.” Queen personif ies her swaggering, take-no-prisoners lyrics. On the Eat My Pussy single “My Way,” for example, she raps: “I’m a spoiled-ass bitch, I’ma get what I wish / If that nigga got a problem, he could suck his own dick / I got my own shit / I think I’m on, bitch /

Queen and her cousins celebrate the arrival of the pizza. é MORGAN ELISE JOHNSON

I’m 21 years old and I got my own business.” She doesn’t depend on no man, or on anyone else for that matter. She’s the head bitch in charge at all times. And like Trina from Trick Daddy’s late-90s crew at Slip-n-Slide Records,

she’s not afraid to talk that real talk about what men are most useful for. “If a nigga can say he just fucked this bitch and make it sound cool, why can’t I say I just got some head from this nigga and I just went on about my fucking day? That’s real too,” Queen says. “I’m snatching my power. Definitely. I don’t make music for, like, weak moments.” It’s that confidence in herself as a black woman that makes Queen a voice for her generation. In hip-hop culture even more so than in the world at large, women are often seen as disposable toys—prized possessions flaunted in music videos and on the red carpet. But Queen demands to be taken seriously as a businesswoman. After G Herbo, she’s the next set to blow on the Machine Entertainment Group roster, and she wants people to know that she’s as much about her money as she is her music. Queen is touring with Herbo this fall, and they’ll arrive in Joliet in late November. Before the tour launched on October 16, she dropped a remix of “My Way” featuring a verse from Herb. “Now, it’s about all of these people that’s looking to me,” Queen says. “Real people. Young people. Young females who just don’t got confidence or believe in themselves. People really don’t know you can do it. Literally, you. They think it gotta be a white nigga or somebody in a tie that’s showing you everything you need to do. They think it gotta be somebody guiding you without it just being you, and your heart, and you praying, and you doing you.” v

m @TheTRiiBE The Block Beat multimedia series is a collaboration with the Triibe (thetriibe.com) that roots Chicago musicians in places and neighborhoods that matter to them. Video accompanies this story at chicagoreader.com.

26 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 18, 2018

MATT ULERY’S SIFTING STARS ENSEMBLE

MUSIC

Fri 10/19, 9 PM, and Sat 10/20, 8 PM, Green Mill, 4802 N. Broadway, $15, 21+

myself, just so it’s more fun,” Ulery says of the ensembles he leads. “That’s basically it—it’s just for fun. I mean, it’s my job, but it works out. It comes together.” Like most fulltime musicians, he has to accept some gigs he’s less than completely passionate about if he wants to make a living, but wherever he can, he conjures up ways to maintain the excitement of the work. Ulery has divided the music on Sifting Stars (out October 16 via Woolgathering) into two radically different sections, emblematic of his eclectic output. The ﬁrst four pieces build off the 2016 double album Festival (Woolgathering), speciﬁcally its compositions for large ensemble, which combine orchestral structures and big-band sounds with plenty of postbop improvisation. For the largeensemble pieces on Sifting Stars, Ulery uses a total of 18 musicians (including members of Eighth Blackbird), giving him an even wider range of possible textures and colors, but there’s very little improvising—these are intricate art songs scored for shifting subsets of a symphony. He’s written vocal

Matt Ulery reinvents his sound again The jazz bassist blends styles and scenes with his multifarious new Sifting Stars project.

or all the contributions that bassist and composer Matt Ulery makes to the Chicago jazz scene—whether via his own music or via platforms he creates—he rarely pats himself on the back. He’s not a gratuitous self-promoter either, preferring to let his music speak for itself. And there’s a lot of

é DAVID RACCUGLIA

By IZZY YELLEN

parts before—on 2012’s By a Little Light, for instance, and 2014’s In the Ivory—and this time he works with two singers, frequent collaborator Grazyna Auguscik and new recording partner Katie Ernst (of Twin Talk). With this dazzlingly diverse palette, Ulery can go in lots of directions: like Ellington, he employs specific instrumental voices in idiosyncratic ways, some of which seem especially surprising in context of modern “third stream” classical-jazz fusion; at other times he adds folk inﬂuences, occasionally Balkan but mostly American, including prewar old-time music and relatively contemporary singer-songwriter fare. He paints with these novel colors as an eager artist would, but with restraint and reﬁnement. The second part of Sifting Stars takes quite a turn: Ulery sits out as a player, handing over his music to Chicago-based quintet Axiom Brass. The members of Axiom play a multipart suite inspired by an Ivan Albright painting in the Art Institute’s collection, Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida—Ulery tried to imagine what the J

it to speak: the brand-new Sifting Stars is Ulery’s eighth album as a bandleader since his debut in 2008. He also plays as a sideman in uncountable groups (ad hoc as well as established), leads weekly jams at the Whistler with drummer Quin Kirchner, and runs his own label, Woolgathering Records. “I like the idea of keeping things fresh for

OCTOBER 18, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 27

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A Reader staﬀer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn.

IN ROTATION

Come enjoy one of Chicago’s ﬁnest beer gardens! OCTOBER MORESO 18.... SURKIS JANUARY 11.................. FLABBY SEPTEMBER 20 QUINN FEBRUARY 23.....DAVID .....MIKE FELTENHOFFMAN SHOW 8PM MAYA KEYTAR SEPTEMBER 21 .....WAGNER & MORSE DRAFT JANUARY 12.................. AMERICAN OCTOBER 19.... THEDYNAMOS JETSTAR 88SMEN FEBRUARY 24 .....DARK SEPTEMBER 22 .....THE JANUARY 13.................. DJROOM SKID LICIOUS ENTROPY SEPTEMBER 23 ....WHOLESOMERADIO NIGHT GROUP WHITEWOLFSONICPRINCESS JANUARY 14.................. TONY DO DJ ROSARIO OCTOBER 20.... MURPHY JONNY MOGAMBO THOMPSON 9:30PM MOJO 49 JANUARY 17.................. JAMIE WAGNER & FRIENDS OCTOBER 21.... MIKE TONYFELTEN DO ROSARIO GROUP JANUARY 18.................. MIKE FELTON THE RON BAND AND RACHEL OCTOBER 22.... RC BIG 7PM SHOW DJ NIGHT FEBRUARY 25 .....WHOLESOMERADIO JANUARY 19.................. SITUATION DAVID SEPTEMBER 24 .....RC BIGPETER BAND 7PM OCTOBER 24.... ERIC SCHWARTZ MAXLIELLIAM ANNA BIRDGANGS 9:30PM OCTOBER SUNNDOG FEBRUARY25.... 26 .....RC BIG BAND 7PM JANUARY 20.................. FIRST WARD PROBLEMS TITTY WIGGLERS CITTY OCTOBER 26.... RED JANUARY 21.................. TONY DO ROSARIO GROUP8PM DUDE SAME FEBRUARY 28 .....PETER CASANOVA OCTOBER 28.... WHOLESOMERADIO DJ QUARTET NIGHT SEPTEMBER 26 .....PETER CASANOVA JANUARY 22.................. RC BIG QUARTET BANDBAND 7PM OCTOBER 31.... THOMAS A MATECKI MARCH 1............SMILIN’ BOBBY AND THE CLEMTONES SEPTEMBER 27 .....DORIAN TAJ JANUARY 24.................. PETER CASONOVA QUARTET NOVEMBER 1.... SMILIN’ BOBBY AND THE CLEMTONES SEPTEMBER 28 .....TOURS THE WICK JANUARY2............ICE 25.................. NOVEMBER 2.... ICEBOXBOX AND BIG HOUSE MARCH BULLY PULPIT NOVEMBER 3.... FIRST WARD PROBLEMS JANUARY 26.................. THE SINS HEPKATS SEPTEMBER 29 .....SOMEBODY’S SKIPPIN’ ROCKTARRINGTON 10PM NOVEMBER 4.... FEATURING THE HATE & THE HARVEST MARCH 3............CHIDITAROD AND JOE LANASA JANUARY 27.................. THE STRAY BOLTS MIKE FELTEN 8:30 PM SEPTEMBER 30 .....OFF THE VINE 4:30PM MARCH 7............JAMIE WAGNER & FRIENDS ANDREW D HUBER JANUARY 28.................. WHOLESOMERADIO NUCLEAR JAZZ QUARKTET 7:30PMDJ NIGHT

EVERY TUESDAY (EXCEPT 2ND) 8PM OPEN MIC HOSTED BY MIKE EVERY TUESDAY (EXCEPT 2ND)&AT ATMIKE 8PM OPEN MIC HOSTED BY JIMIJON AMERICA ON TUESDAY EVENINGS (EXCEPT 2ND)

28 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 18, 2018

LUCA CIMARUSTI

Reader music listings coordinator Bad Religion, Into the Unknown In 1983, the band that all but invented west-coast skate punk decided they didn’t want to play it anymore and made this hilarious record of synthheavy 80s prog-pop. Hated by their fans, it shamed the band into breaking up brieﬂy, and upon re-forming they pretended it’d never existed. A few warbly bootlegs persist online, which kind of sound like Bad Religion trying to re-create Abacab by Genesis. Sure, when it really comes down to it, it kinda sucks, but it’s a fascinating and entertaining listen.

Sounds a little like a skate-punk band trying to play Abacab by Genesis.

Rich Tupica, There Was a Light: The Cosmic History of Chris Bell and the Rise of Big Star Released by HoZac Books, this oral history collects an overwhelming amount of information about alternative-rock pioneer Chris Bell. The accounts come from bandmates, family, and others whose lives were changed by Bell’s records, giving you a sense of what a powerful and talented presence he was. The detailed notes of all his recording sessions are a must for Big Star lovers. Q Drum Company, Gentleman’s Series copper snare drums Anyone got $900 I can borrow? Los Angeles-based Q Drum Company, co-owned by wizardly Nine Inch Nails drummer Ilan Rubin, has been crafting drums out of steel and copper for years, but they really did something magical with these handmade snares. Modeled after the classic Ludwig Black Beauty, they have a look, feel, and sound that’ll give any drummer goosebumps. I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of my life watching YouTube demos of this snare drum.

JOE GAC Bassist

in Meat Wave, recording engineer The RRA, “Don’t Dance With the Devil” Late in my high school years, a friend of mine got a n e i g h t - t ra c k d i g i tal recorder that had a built-in drum machine. . . . Eight tracks! Think of the possibilities! Unsurprisingly, it ended up being mainly used for recording crude raps to preset beats generated by that drum machine. I don’t know anything about the RRA, except that he’s somehow connected to the vibe and spirit of those times. You’ve got eight tracks and a box of Boone’s Farm—make something that’s unlistenable to everybody who doesn’t get it. Blake Rules & Netherfriends, Kids Trap 1, 2, and 3 Say what you want about Blake Rules & Netherfriends, but they may be the world’s only source of clean, educational, familyfriendly trap. I haven’t seen the Mister Rogers movie, but I’m pretty sure that if he were alive he’d have no problem with this. And if I had kids, for them these records would be straight-up nostalgic in 2040. Maybe they’d discover other Netherfriends releases, such as Don’t Be a Fuck Boy, Don’t Be a Fuck Boy 2, or My Last Album About Fuck Boys. The YouTube livestream Loﬁ Hip Hop Radio 24/7 I spend a good amount of time in my car driving Uber, so I need music that’s agreeable to most and doesn’t foster road rage.

It’s no Don’t Be a Fuck Boy, but it’s pretty good.

Ovlov é GABRIELLE AMLICK

This livestream checks all the boxes: It’s relatively inoﬀensive, there’s a minimum of repetition, there are no commercials, and best of all it chills everyone the hell out. I swear it’s the sole reason I maintain a decent rating. It basically turns my car into a rolling coﬀee shop.

BEN GRIGG Bassist in Milked, guitarist in Fckr Jr

Ovlov, “Short Morgan” There are entire weeks of my life when Ovlov is the only band I want to listen to. The addition of the new Tru to this Connecticut group’s catalog has done nothing but incite more bingeing. “Short Morgan” is a standout on this record of sweet, sweet jams: it hits my personal trifecta of thick choruses, ripping solos, and melancholy lyrics bemoaning friends/friendships. Landowner, “Moving Again” The first time I heard Massachusetts band Landowner, I was struck by how fresh and distinctive they sound. I sent their music to friends and played it for anybody who came over to my place. To my ears, the real staying power of this track oﬀ the recent Blatant—despite its unconventional instrumentation and sound, with a saxophone doubling the main riff—comes from the vocals. The lyrics are both relatable and unhinged: “Everything I own can be thrown away / I only read while scrolling / And I’m moving again.” Kal Marks, “Loosed” Boston three-piece Kal Marks are a criminally underappreciated band. They’re explosive live and on recordings. They create a compelling range of tones and textures on this track, from February’s Universal Care, painting a haunting image in vocal yelps, driving bass, and heavy guitar stabs. Also, that bass line in the intro!

MUSIC continued from 27 woman in the picture might be thinking and feeling. The suite has a distinct folk flavor, like much of Ulery’s recent music, but it’s less straightforwardly song-oriented and hummable. The harmonies are a little unexpected from a traditional brass quintet, but they’re entirely in character for Ulery—as is the music’s nearly constant atmosphere of nostalgia and introspection. “In writing for these ensembles of established instrumentation, I’m experimenting with new idioms and sonic possibilities,” Ulery writes of Sifting Stars on his website. Ulery experiments within tradition not just in his own music but also by finding new ways to express his love for standards. Most Monday nights for the past year, he and Kirchner have led a jam at the Whistler, striving to create a space where musicians can feel secure in taking untested approaches to tried-and-true songs. The two of them typically begin by playing a set with a guest, then open the session to anybody who’s come prepared to play standards (at some point, if there are enough musicians on hand, both leaders might leave the stage). It’s a welcoming and well-loved event, attracting up-and-comers already on the scene as well as brand-new players still in school—and notably, a fair number of folks show up just to listen. The jam runs organically, and it owes its relaxed feeling to the guidance of Ulery and Kirchner, who help decide who plays and step in when needed. Ulery also uses Woolgathering Records to nurture a community—it reﬂects his values as an artist, allowing him to innovate and follow his instincts with no commercial pressure. Launched to release Festival, the label has grown alongside Ulery’s music, so that now he can put out his friends’ records too. Pianist Rob Clearfield (who’s been on every one of Ulery’s albums) had Woolgathering’s first non-Ulery release, the February 2018 solo record Wherever You’re Starting From, and he’s now been joined by trumpeter Russ Johnson (Headlands) and saxophonist Tim Haldeman (Open Water as a Child), whose records both came out the same day as Sifting Stars. “It felt good to try to help my friends release their music when it otherwise might not happen as easily,” Ulery says. The jazz scene in Chicago, if not the whole midwest, is usually a mutually supportive community, with artists encouraging one another and

working almost as hard on their colleagues’ creations as on their own. Ulery embodies that spirit, and it’s especially easy to see the results when you watch him play. On September 28 at Constellation, he performed with his By a Little Light ensemble, and it was hard to miss how much each musician cared about the music and the other players—not just in the quality of their performances but also in their solicitous gestures to one another, their frequent eye contact, their smiles. This warmth is the norm in Chicago jazz today—people often work together just because they enjoy it. Lots of midwestern jazz musicians eventually move to New York or Los Angeles to angle for bigger platforms or fresh contexts, but Ulery has spent his whole career based in Chicago and isn’t going anywhere. He doesn’t feel like he needs to move to get a new perspective, because there are so many shifting, overlapping communities here already. “I’ve gotten so much back from living here,” he says. “I see myself making an effort to keep engaging different scenes—as a bass player and as a bandleader, a person that writes music—so that I can embrace who’s coming, who’s here.” Ulery celebrates the release of Sifting Stars at the Green Mill on Friday and Saturday, October 19 and 20. He couldn’t duplicate the album’s instrumentation, so he’s assembled a new ten-piece group for the shows: it combines a quintet of Ulery regulars (himself on bass, Clearﬁeld on piano, Johnson on trumpet, Jon Deitemyer on drums, and Geof Bradﬁeld on clarinet) with Ernst on vocals and the Kaia String Quartet (Victoria Moreira and Naomi Culp on violins, Amanda Grimm on viola, and Hope Shepherd DeCelle on cello). They’ll play Sifting Stars material as well as music from other recent Ulery albums. “ The i n st r u mentat ion /orc hest rat ion on the album is logistically challenging to make happen at the Green Mill for six-hour sets, especially because it’s mostly throughcomposed,” Ulery says. “So I’m taking advantage of this creative limitation to make something fresh for these performances, where we can stretch out on the material when appropriate—I created special new arrangements of all the music on Sifting Stars for this band. I’ve got to keep it interesting, challenging, and new.” v

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Recommended and notable shows and critics’ insights for the week of October 18

MUSIC

ALL AGES

THURSDAY18

PICK OF THE WEEK

Chicagoan Robbie Fulks joins forces with country stalwart Linda Gail Lewis

Amy Rigby Slushy and Hawley open. 8 PM, Burlington, 3425 W. Fullerton, $8. 21+ Amy Rigby’s new album, The Old Guys (Southern Domestic Recordings), begins with a bold 12-string guitar chord that sounds like Roger McGuinn filtered through Tom Petty. It kicks off with “From philiproth@gmail to rzimmerman@aol.com,” which relates an imaginary e-mail sent by Philip Roth to Bob Dylan on the occasion of the latter winning the Nobel Prize for literature. Rigby only needs a few vivid details to send you to Roth’s hotel room and feel both the writer’s envy and grudging respect for the guy who supplanted him as the literary champion of an era. The next song, “Are We Still There Yet?,” uses similarly sharp observations about encounters with an old friend to remind her of when she knew what mattered: what to drink and how to play music in her car. And by contrast, how little she knows now. Whatever Rigby writes about, you’re right there with her, and likely humming her music afterward too. The Old Guys is Rigby’s eighth solo album, as well as her first in 13 years. She’s spent the years in between blogging, recording, and touring as a duo with her husband, Wreckless Eric, and writing a forthcoming memoir provisionally titled Summer of My Wasted Youth. On the record, Eric’s masterful production gilds the classic rock-grade hooks of Rigby’s tunes with psychedelic and country touches. But when she plays solo, as she’s doing on this tour, Rigby’s wit and vulnerability put the songs over as effectively as any band. —BILL MEYER

é ANDY GOODWIN

ROBBIE FULKS & LINDA GAIL LEWIS, LINDSAY BEAVER

Fri 10/19, 9 PM, FitzGerald’s, 6615 W. Roosevelt, Berwyn, $25. 21+

WHEN ROCKABILLY ARTISTS make comeback albums, they always seem to include at least one song that looks back on the way things were at the dawn of their genre. Carl Perkins probably did it more than anybody—reminding everyone that He Was There When Rock ’n’ Roll Started. The title track of Wild! Wild! Wild!, the new Bloodshot release from Robbie Fulks and Linda Gail Lewis, continues that tradition, reminiscing on rock’s early days while taking a few potshots at today’s sounds. But Fulks’s snarky sense of humor and Lewis’s charisma save it from being total nostalgia or cliche. For those who need an introduction, Fulks has been writing and performing traditional country music nonstop since he came to Chicago in 1983. Linda Gail Lewis’s career goes back further; the sister of country/rockabilly titan Jerry Lee Lewis, she

30 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 18, 2018

started releasing her own music in the 1960s, and through the decades she’s put out a ton of great records. She was still performing regularly when Fulks approached her, and based on the one show Fulks and Lewis played at the Hideout two years ago, their current collaboration is a must-see. This album is split evenly between “hillbilly boogies” and honky-tonk country. Even though Fulks is featured prominently as a vocalist, there’s plenty of Lewis to go around. At least two of these numbers, “Memphis Never Falls From Style” and “It Came From the South,” pay open tribute to the Mecca of roots music. Even then, there’s an irreverent tone that keeps it from being too stuffy. Kudos to Fulks for bringing this legend back to the light, and to Lewis for proving that there was more than one Ferriday Fireball in the family. —JAMES PORTER

Amy Rigby é TED BARRON

MUSIC

4544 N LINCOLN AVENUE, CHICAGO IL OLDTOWNSCHOOL.ORG • 773.728.6000

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 18 7PM

Henry Kapono Welcome 2 My Paradise Tour In Szold Hall

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 20 8PM

A Place to Bury Strangers é EBRU YILDIZ

The Martin Hayes Quartet

featuring Dennis Cahill, Liz Knowles, and Doug Wieselman

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 21 7PM

Rickie Lee Jones TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23 8PM WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 24 8PM

Swearin’ Empath and Sore History open. 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $15, $13 in advance. 18+ A history of 2010s indie rock wouldn’t be complete without at least one chapter—if not a volume— about twin sisters and musicians Katie and Allison Crutchfield. As half of the Birmingham band P.S. Eliot, which broke up in 2011, they released a handful of recordings, including two full-length albums that helped build a foundation for emo’s fourth wave to eventually find something resembling crossover success. Katie soldiered on with the punk-inflected solo project Waxahatchee, which has become one of the most recognizable names in contemporary indie rock (Waxahatchee recently headlined Thalia Hall and opened for the colossally important reunited pop-punk trio Jawbreaker in Los Angeles). As for Allison, following the split of P.S. Eliot, she teamed up with boyfriend Kyle Gilbride to cofront Swearin’, a charmingly rambunctious indierock group equally capable of knocking out roughhewn rippers and stripped-back, intimate quasi-ballads. But the couple broke up in 2015, and Swearin’ followed suit that summer—an amicable decision that Allison told Stereogum came out of a desire to keep their friendship intact. Though she released her debut solo album, Tourist in This Town, through Merge last year, it would appear that Swearin’ was never far from her mind; earlier this month Merge released the band’s comeback album, Fall Into the Sun. The new songs are smoother than ever before, but still contain the rough-around-the-edges energy that powers the band’s back catalog. More importantly, Swearin’ still finds joy seesawing between Allison’s compact, knuckle-punch songwriting and Kyle’s ragged, lumbering style. —LEOR GALIL

FRIDAY19 A Place to Bury Strangers Kraus opens. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $15. 21+ Once proclaimed “New York’s Loudest Band,” this Brooklyn-based trio has had a rough time of it since recording Transﬁxiation, which was released

in 2015. Front man Oliver Ackermann cofounded the Death by Audio effects pedals company in a Williamsburg warehouse in 2002, and in 2007 the building evolved to include a co-op music venue of the same name. The band also made their home there, but in 2014 the building was taken over by Vice Media, and the tenants were evicted (the events were the subject of a 2016 documentary by Matthew Conboy). Ackermann laments in the liner notes of last April’s Pinned that he can’t get as loud as he’d like to in his current space. That constraint may explain why the album feels more restrained and less overwhelming than the band’s previous releases—its roaring noise sounds like one massive element that’s made to serve in place to calculated eﬀect among the dark, minimalist menace. New drummer and singer Lia Simone Braswell is a highlight, a chilling chanteuse amid the surging wreckage. But though the album may be the result of a setback, they’re unlikely to be held down for long, especially since they have the support of their peers; brand-new this month is Re-Pinned, which features remixes of the Pinned songs by Slowdive, No Age, Trentemoller, Eric Copeland, Davy Drones, Metz, TBO, and Roly Porter, who peel apart each track’s layers and weave them into something new. —MONICA KENDRICK

Dead Rider Danielson and Nick Alvarez Ghost & Bell Ensemble open. 9 PM, Martyrs’, 3855 N. Lincoln, $17, $15 in advance. 21+ For nearly a decade, Chicago’s Dead Rider have devoted their genius to the underground rock scene; they’ve made ﬁve albums, and each release has been a remarkable occasion. Their new one, Dead Rider Trio Featuring Mr. Paul Williams (Drag City, out October 19), is a collaboration with London-based spoken-word artist and experimental musician Williams that was recorded in a sort of exquisite-corpse format, and what strikes me most of all about it is how mesmerizingly hilarious it is. Williams is a master monologist, and his surreal ramblings over Dead Rider’s disorienting, incongruous backing create a dazzling uneasy listening experience. From the Beefheartesque chaos of “Candles on Crabs” to the J

Presented by the Old Town School of Folk Music and Thalia Hall

The Milk Carton Kids with special guests The Barr Brothers at Thalia Hall • 1807 S Allport St

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26 8PM

Dom Flemons

The American Songster with special guest The Brother Brothers In Szold Hall

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 10AM SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28 10AM

Spooky Singalong

Saturday concert at Maurer Hall, 4544 N Lincoln Sunday concert at Armitage Hall, 909 W Armitage

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 8PM

Božo Vrećo SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 8PM

Hawktail

formerly Haas Kowert Tice • In Szold Hall

ACROSS THE STREET IN SZOLD HALL 4545 N LINCOLN AVENUE, CHICAGO IL

10/19

Global Dance Party: Volo Bogtrotters 10/20 Uncovered: Aretha Franklin 11/2 Global Dance Party: Orisha Dance Chicago with Iré Elese Abure 11/3 Tlen-Huicani 11/8 Pieta Brown / David Huckfelt (The Pines)

WORLD MUSIC WEDNESDAY SERIES FREE WEEKLY CONCERTS, LINCOLN SQUARE

10/24 Fareed Haque & KAIA String Quartet 10/31 Chicago Paris Cabaret Connexion

OLDTOWNSCHOOL.ORG OCTOBER 18, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 31

Less scrolling.

MUSIC

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

Dead Rider é BREAD CASEY

continued from 31

More strumming.

Fluxus-worthy theatrics of “An Inching Thief,” the effect is sort of like being trapped around a bonfire and tripping balls while Robyn Hitchcock and Viv Stanshall try to upstage each other. Meanwhile criminally underrated guitarist Todd Rittmann plays what sounds like a collage of ﬂooding waters, thirdrail electricity, Hendrix outtakes, and dinosaur mating calls. Though Williams won’t be at this show, it’s still something to put on your calendar: Dead Rider remain one of today’s ﬁnest outposts of Weird America. —MONICA KENDRICK

Robbie Fulks & Linda Gail Lewis See Pick of the Week, page 32. Lindsay Beaver opens. 9 PM, FitzGerald’s, 6615 W. Roosevelt, Berwyn, $25. 21+ Lonely Parade Casper Skulls headline; Strange Foliage, Lonely Parade, the Knees, and Gentle Heat open. 7 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, $8. 17+

Give your digital life a break. Connect over music, dance & more. New classes start October 29. Sign up at oldtownschool.org

32 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 18, 2018

The oldest I’ve ever felt was during one night over the summer, when my band played a show with Montreal trio Lonely Parade. I watched the band’s members—who were not even legal drinking age— mop the floor with every other group on the bill. They’re the type of band that can make even the saltiest, most seasoned punk think, “I’ll never top that, should I just hang it up?” On the brand-new The Pits (Buzz), Lonely Parade play razor-sharp, mean postpunk brimming with intricate guitar lines and busy rhythms. The vocals of guitarist Augusta Veno (and on a few tracks bassist Charlotte Dempsey) sound disaffected, but their lyrics contain thoughtful observations about a range of heavy topics, including scene politics, gender identity, and disillusionment with society. Though their music isn’t stylistically groundbreaking, Lonely Parade pull oﬀ their songs with so much ﬁnesse and heart you

can’t help but feel like the tides are turning and the new generation is taking over as you’re listening. The Pits is a postpunk triumph, the kind of record that makes those that came before it obsolete, and Lonely Parade are not a band to miss. —LUCA CIMARUSTI

Progtoberfest Iv See also Saturday and Sunday. 5 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint and Reggie’s Rock Club, 2105 S. State, single-day tickets $40$110, three-day passes $175-$400. Rock Club shows 17+, Music Joint shows 21+. Even if you don’t have tickets to see Phil Collins— the King of Prog-Pop himself—at United Center on Monday night, you can still get your ﬁx of all things heady, techy, and whimsical this week in Chicago. Progtoberfest IV is a massive three-day celebration of prog rock old and new that spans both stages at Reggie’s. In 2018, progressive rock is a

Laetitia Sonami é BROWN U

MUSIC

The Lonely Parade é COLIN MEDLEY

superniche genre, and this fest brings some of its most impressive names to the forefront, including Pat Metheny drummer Paul Wertico, former Spock’s Beard members Neal Morse and Nick D’Virgilio (performing separately with their own ensembles), and sci-fi-influenced Canadian band FM. Progtoberfest also features a bunch of tribute acts: Canadian singer Marc Martel pays homage to Queen, local prog band District 97 plays the jazz fusion music of King Crimson drummer Bill Bruford’s collaborative work with guitarist Allan Holdsworth, and there’s also a Genesis cover band, Abacab, named after one of Mr. Collins’s finest albums. The biggest draw of the festival is the 50th anniversary performance of English psychprog legends Soft Machine. The band’s larger-thanlife founders, Robert Wyatt, Mike Ratledge, Kevin Ayers, and Daevid Allen, are nowhere to be seen, but this lineup does feature a good handful of its mid-70s members—drummer John Marshall, bassist Roy Babbington, and guitarist John Etheridge— who will play a mix of tunes from throughout their catalog. —LUCA CIMARUSTI

switching between a MIDI keyboard and a laptop—the sound is complex, but the execution is bland. The live shows of sound artist and composer Laetitia Sonami are the antithesis of this sort of insularity—rather than simply pushing buttons and keys, she’s a conduit who manipulates sound through movement. Sonami, who’s 61, merges performance art and experimental music through instruments of her own invention that she plays by making gestures with her body. Her most famous creation, the Lady’s Glove, is an elbowlength apparatus covered in sensors and wires that gives the appearance of an externalized vascular system. Sonami directs the Lady’s Glove in trancelike ﬂuidity, moving her right arm with graceful yet purposeful motions as if divining sound out of air. After 25 years of performing with the Lady’s Glove, Sonami is moving in new directions: three years ago she invented the Spring Spyre, an instrument that uses machine learning to manipulate sound based on gestural cues. At ﬁrst glance the Spyre—which involves a metal ring the size of a bicycle wheel and three intersecting wire coils—looks deceptively simple, but the complex technology that’s attached allows Sonami to oscillate from ambient drones to glitchy static with just a slight touch of the springs. Her movements on the Spyre are smaller than when she utilizes the Lady’s Glove—twisting springs rather than sweeping her whole arm—but the same dreamlike quality pervades. Her shows with the J

Laetitia Sonami 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $15, $10 in advance. 18+ The extent of onstage action during minimalist noise shows too often consists of a composer

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OCTOBER 18, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 33

MUSIC continued from 33

new instrument are less theatrical than before, but Sonami taps into her sense of drama by embodying a character, an oracle who came into being when the spirits of three women merged during an earthquake. “There’s still a lot of unknown—it’s exciting but uncomfortable,” Sonami recently told me, about performing with the Spyre. “Even the stories are new.” —ANNA WHITE

SATURDAY20

Joyce Manor Vundabar and Big Eyes open. 7:30 PM, the Vic, 3145 N. Sheﬃeld, $28, $23 in advance. b

34 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 18, 2018

On its ﬁfth LP, Million Dollars to Kill Me (Epitaph), indie and emo quartet Joyce Manor exhibits less rawness, more melody, and heightened production. And though it’s the band’s catchiest record to date, it didn’t start as a Joyce Manor album but rather as a collaboration between front man Barry Johnson and Impossibles guitarist and vocalist Rory Phillips. Million Dollars eventually transformed into a proper Joyce Manor project, recorded and produced by Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou at GodCity Studio, with additional recording by Bad Religion guitarist and Epitaph label head Brett Gurewitz. With those hardcore-punk legends behind the boards, one might not expect an album that skews more toward power pop than jagged emo shout-alongs, but that’s exactly the case here. Phillips has cowriting

Drama é LILLIE EIGER

credits on four tracks, including the standout “Silly Games,” which sounds like an indie-rock take on a Roy Orbison song. Vocal harmonies are more pronounced throughout the album than on previous records, and on lead vocals, Johnson displays little of the trademark vocal intensity present on older Joyce Manor hits such as 2011’s “Constant Headache” and 2014’s “Falling in Love Again”—even recalling Bad Religion singer Greg Graﬃn on “Think I’m Still in Love with You.” The band adds new instrumental accents as well, including E-bow on acoustic ballad “I’m Not the One” and glockenspiel on “Silly Games.” Though Million Dollars to Kill Me basks in its softer side, it’s still a rock album, and its lean running time (ten tracks in 22 minutes) keeps it eﬃcient in this era of short attention spans. Expect a tight, emotionally resonant set this Saturday at the Vic. —SCOTT MORROW

Progtoberfest Iv See Friday. 11 AM, Reggie’s Music Joint and Reggie’s Rock Club, 2105 S. State, single-day tickets $40-$110, three-day passes $175-$400. Rock Club shows 17+, Music Joint shows 21+.

SUNDAY21 Drama Jain headlines. 7:30 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $24, $21 in advance. b Singer, producer, and chef Via Rosa moved to Chicago in 2010 to help take care of her grandmother and work with local production collective ThemPeople. As she told culture site Chicago Cre-

atives last year, outside of family obligations, she spent the vast majority of her time during her ﬁrst five years in the city working out of their space: “Literally the night that I landed, I went to their studio.” Through ThemPeople she met singer Jean Deaux, formerly of the local collective the Village, and soon Deaux introduced Rosa to the musician who’d become one of her most important creative partners: producer Na’el Shehade. As Drama, Rosa and Shehade make pristine, otherworldly pop entrenched in the gray areas of romantic love. On their second EP, May’s Lies After Love (self-released), Shehade’s spartan dance percussion and gossamer synths magnify the emotion in Rosa’s cool, resonant vocals; when she sings about facing a torrent of memories at the end of a relationship on “Majid,” her poised performance and Shehade’s gently ascending instrumentals fill a song about heartache with a sense of hope. —LEOR GALIL

Progtoberfest IV See Friday. 11 AM, Reggie’s Music Joint and Reggie’s Rock Club, 2105 S. State, single-day tickets $40-$110, three-day passes $175-$400. Rock Club shows 17+, Music Joint shows 21+. Tobi Lou Kyle headlines; Marc E. Bassy and Tobi Lou open. 7 PM, Concord Music Hall, 2047 N. Milwaukee, $41, $36 in advance. b One of the most colorful and ﬂuid rapper-singers to emerge from Chicagoland in the past few years built a foundation for his career on baseball. Tobi Adeyemi, who records and performs as Tobi Lou, started the decade as a professional ballplayer; he

MUSIC

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

vocals glide across shards of juke percussion, Tobi Lou makes sure he sounds like no one else. He’s in the middle of a proliﬁc year, having already dropped three EPs, all through Artclub and Empire: February’s Tobi Lou and the Moon, April’s Tobi Lou and the Loop, and August’s Tobi Lou and the Juice. His vocals are irresistibly forlorn on the latest EP, and on “High Score” he nonchalantly mixes rapping and singing, then emerges with a whole new vocal DNA. —LEOR GALIL

Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation 1. Publication Title: Reader 2. Publication Number: 330-310 3. Filing Date: September 28, 2018 4. Issue Frequency: Weekly 5. Number of Issues Published Annually: 50 6. Annual Subscription Price: $95.00 7. Complete Mailing Address of Known Ofﬁce of Publication: 30 N Racine Ave, Suite 300, Chicago, Cook County, IL 60607-2184 8. Complete Mailing Address of Headquarters or General Business Ofﬁce of Publisher: 30 N Racine Ave, Suite 300, Chicago, Cook County, IL 60607-2184 9. Full Names and Complete Mailing Addresses of Publisher, Editor and Managing Editor: Publisher: N/A Editor: Jake Malooley, 350 N. Orleans, 10th Floor, Chicago, Cook County, IL 60654-1975 Managing Editor: Jake Malooley, 350 N. Orleans, 10th Floor, Chicago, Cook County, IL 60654-1975 10. Owner: ST Acquisition Holdings, LLC, 30 N Racine Ave, Suite 300, Chicago, IL 60654: Edwin Eisendrath; Chicago Federation of Labor; William A. Brandt, Jr. Discretionary Trust U/A Joan V. Brandt 1987 Trust; Construction and General Laborers’ District Council of Chicago and Vicinity; John Eisendrath; Gompers-Louis Media, Corp.; Sidney N. Herman Revocable Trust U/A dated 12/23/2004; Elzie L. Higginbottom; Labor/Management Union Carpentry Cooperation Promotion Fund; LCG Newshound LLC; Service Employees International Union; Healthcare Illinois Indiana; Service Employees International Union, Local No.1, Thirty North, LLC 11. Known Bondholder, Mortgagees, and Other Security Holders Owning or Holding 1 Percent or More of Total Amount of Bonds, Mortgages, or Other Securities: Not applicable 12. Not applicable. 13. Publication Title: Reader 14. Issue Date for Circulation Data Below: August 30, 2018 15. Extent and Nature of Circulation Average No. Copies No. Copies of Single Each Issue During Issue Published Preceding 12 Months Nearest to Filing Date a. b.

MONDAY22 Gerry Hemingway 7:30 PM, Experimental Sound Studio, 5925 N. Ravenswood, $10, $8 students. b

Tobi Lou é AMARACHI NWOSU

was an outfielder for the Joliet Slammers during their 2011 season. “I was making like $600 a month and living at my parent’s house,” he told DJ Booth earlier this year. “During the oﬀseason, I would just train and make music.” He stopped playing baseball in 2012, and turned his attention to music, but grew so tired of being compared to Chance the Rapper and other local rappers (as he’s stated in many interviews) that two years later he traded Chicago for Los Angeles to pursue his new career (originally releasing tracks under the name Wonda), and he now splits his time between the two cities. On his breakout single, 2016’s “Game Ova,” a candy-coated kaleidoscopic pop song on which his velvety

If Gerry Hemingway had retired from music in 1994, at the end of his 11-year tenure as the drummer with Anthony Braxton’s quartet, he would have been assured a lasting place in the annals of jazz and improvised music. But his contributions to that combo—which used its preternatural rapport to realize Braxton’s concept of superimposing and alternating between multiple compositions in real time—turned out to be an early chapter in a long career that has encompassed diligent explorations of lyrically expressive jazz, rigorously cohesive free improvisation, and empathetic pairings of his acoustic percussion and electronic sounds with theatrical and video works. Hemingway’s 2014 CD/ DVD release, Kernelings (Auricle), is the most recent document of a solo practice that began 40 years earlier when he was a student of Wadada Leo Smith. Whether articulating intricate, rapidly changing rhythmic patterns or charting the transformations that electronics can visit upon isolated beats, Hemingway’s performances use a scientifically rigorous understanding of acoustic essentials to extract poetry from sound. For this concert, which is part of the Experimental Sound Studio’s Option series, Hemingway will play a solo set and then sit down to talk about it with local percussionist Tim Daisy. —BILL MEYER v

16. 17. 18.

Total Number of Copies (Net Press Run) 84,809 76,281 Legitimate Paid and/or Requested Distribution (1) Outside County Paid/Requested Mail Subscriptions 69 63 Stated on PS Form 3541 (2) In-County Paid /Requested Mail Subscriptions Stated on 31 33 PS Form 3541 (3) Sales Through Dealers and Carriers, Street Vendors, 78,010 69,836 Counter Sales and Other Paid or Requested Distribution Outside USPS (4) Requested Copies Distributed by Other Classes of Mail Through the USPS 0 0 c. Total Paid and/or Requested Distribution 78,110 69,932 d. Non-requested Distribution (By Mail and Outside the Mail) 0 0 (1) Outside-County Non-requested Copies Stated on PS Form 3541 (2) In-County Non-requested Copies Stated on PS Form 3541 (3) Non-requested Copies Distributed Through the USPS By Other Classes of Mail (4) Non-requested Copies Distributed Outside the Mail e. Total Non-requested Distribution 0 0 f. Total Distribution (Sum of 15c. And 15e) 78,110 69,932 g. Copies not Distributed 6,699 6,349 h. Total (Sum of 15f and g) 84,809 76,281 i. Percent Paid (15c Divided by 15f times 100) 100 100 Electronic Circulation Not Claimed Publication of Statement of Ownership Publication Required. Will be printed in the October 18, 2017 issue of this publication. Signature and Title of Editor, Publisher, Business Manager, or Owner: /s/ Edwin Eisendrath, Owner 9/28/18 I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and complete. I understand that anyone who furnishes false or misleading information on this form or who omits material or information requested on the form may be subject to criminal sanctions (including ﬁnes and imprisonment) and/or civil sanctions (including civil penalties).

Gerry Hemingway é JORDAN HEMINGWAY

OCTOBER 18, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 35

JOBS ADMINISTRATIVE SALES & MARKETING FOOD & DRINK SPAS & SALONS BIKE JOBS GENERAL REAL ESTATE RENTALS FOR SALE NON-RESIDENTIAL ROOMMATES MARKETPLACE GOODS SERVICES HEALTH & WELLNESS INSTRUCTION MUSIC & ARTS NOTICES MESSAGES LEGAL NOTICES ADULT SERVICES

JOBS

SALES & MARKETING CUSTOMER SERVICE

Skyline Design, the top ranked national architectural decorative glass company, seeks motivated and team oriented individual to assist our national sales staff and maintain customer relationships. Duties include but are not limited to assisting and gathering information from our sales representatives and customers consisting of architects, designers and contractors, answering product and process inquiries, and accurately entering pricing, product data, artwork layouts and sample work orders. Maintaining a plan for follow up on opportunities to ensure highest rate of capturing orders is also required as well as a familiarity with Microsoft office. Individual must be dependable, organized and use creative thinking with exceptional communication skills and a positive attitude. Base salary, bonuses and beneﬁts commensurate to experience and position. Please send your resume to jobs@skydesign.com. Visit our website: www.skydesign.com.

food & drink HOSPITALITY STAFFING AGENCY in Chicago is currently

hiring part-time professional waiters, experienced Captains and Basset certified bartenders. Candidates must have a minimum of a full year experience either having worked for a caterer or full service restaurant, corporate dining room experience a plus . Events are mostly in Chicago and near suburbs. Applications are accepted Monday - Thursday from 10 .00am to 3:00pm. At Your Service, Inc. 4541 N. Ravenswood, 2nd Floor 773-334-7774

General Agape Chicago (Chicago, IL) seeks Nursing Home Ministry & International Ministry Coordinator to preach Christianity at Waterford nursing home, visit/ minister to the elderly, & coordinate guest speakers on various topics of faith. reference Job ID: Ministry2018 Submit resumes at agape.chicago.church@gmail. com

EPLAN SOFTWARE & SERVICES, Schaumburg, IL, seeks Training Engineer to provide training s ervices

supporting the installation & integration of EPLAN ComputerAided Engineering (CAE) software products. Conduct training sessions at one of EPLAN’s U.S. offices or customer locations to demonstrate functions & use of EPLAN CAE platform. Provide training for EPLAN employees on current products. Reqts: 2 years’ exp using & installing EPLAN CAE software, including EPLAN Electric P8 product. Exp must include integrating EPLAN P8 into ERP systems & training individuals in use of EPLAN CAE products. Travel to customer locations reqd 25%-50% on annual basis. Mail resume to Ms. Christine Canty, HR Mgr Recruitment, EPLAN Software & Services, 425 N. Martindale Rd., Ste. 470, Schaumburg, IL 60173.

THE NORTHERN TRUST Co. is

seeking a Sr. Consultant, Risk Analytics in Chicago IL, with the following requirements: Master’s degree in Economics, Statistics, Mathematics or a related field and 3 years related experience. Prior experience must include 2 years of experience with each of the following: estimate econometric models based on a variety of probability distributions; develop and maintain Operational Risk Loss Estimation Model using Generalized Linear Models (GLM) and simulations to meet corporate needs and regulatory requirements; monitor model performance and identify root causes for variation in loss projections. Please apply on-line at www. northerntrustcareers.com and search for Req. # 18131

JOIN OUR 20+ yr. experienced te am...be a skilled, well-paid Natural Stone re finisher-restorer working in both commercial and residential locations. We are the best!.. Earn and be satisfied with your work at $ 1725/hr plus 50% of Health Insurance, Disability and Bonus monthly… Join our team. Must be honest, reliable and have some skills in working with upright buffing-polishing machines… A valid Driver License and good references help… Go to our website, see our successes...call us, or write OM Perla sungloss.marble@gmail.com Click here to Reply or Forward 13.17 GB (43%) of 30 GB used Manage Program Policies Powered by Google Last account activity: 11 minutes ago Details

Technical Managers, Business Analytics / Park Ridge, IL: Design & build email, direct email, social media types of campaigns using specs given w/in SLA timeframes using Unica affinium campaign software. Execute data driven initiatives using Unica campaign management tool, perform audience selection, trigger qualification, suppressions, segmentation & arbitration. Work w/ IBM Unica Affinium Campaign, SQL, Tableau, Aprimo & Teradata. Travel /relocate to various unanticipated locations. Send res to Peterson Technology Partners, Inc., 1030 West Higgins Rd, Ste 230, Park Ridge, IL 60068. MANAGEMENT CONSULTANT 2 with Arcadis U.S., Inc. (Chi-

cago, IL)-Assess client business & data processing processes to identify opportunities for imprvmnt of envrnmntl mngmnt comp. systems & document potential gaps. Reqrmnts: Bach’s degree in Envrnmntl Eng’g, Chem Eng’g, Civil Eng’g or rltd field & 1 yr of post bach’s exp. Arcadis is EO & AA employer. For full details on all reqrmnts & to apply online: http://bit.ly/ ManagementConsultant2

MANAGEMENT CONSULTANT 2 with Arcadis U.S., Inc. (Chicago, IL)-Assess client business & data processing processes to identify opportunities for imprvmnt of envrnmntl mngmnt comp. systems & document potential gaps. Reqrmnts: Bach’s degree in Envrnmntl Eng’g, Chem Eng’g, Civil Eng’g or rltd field & 1 yr of post bach’s exp. Arcadis is EO & AA employer. For full details on all reqrmnts & to apply online: http:// bit.ly/ManagementConsultant2

Brininstool + Lynch (Chicago, IL) seeks Architectural Designer responsible for assisting with comp etitions/concept design/schematic design/design development/ construction documents under the supervision of licensed architects. Submit resumes at info@ brininstool-lynch.com, Reference Job ID: 82817.

36 CHICAGO READER | OCTOBER 18, 2018

FINANCIAL:

IMANAGE

LLC

SEEKS in Chicago, IL: Accounting Manager w/ Master’s in Accounting or Bus Admin plus 2 yrs exp as a Staff Accountant. Send resume to Pe opleops@imanage.com (ref. no. L0816) or Attn: Recruiting, 540 W. Madison St., Ste. 300, Chicago, IL 60661.

STUDIO OTHER

RAY

CROSSROADS HOTEL SRO SINGLE RMS Private bath, PHONE,

MATTER

ANALYTICS,

Inc. in Chicago, IL is seeking a Lead Data Scientist to create, dvlp, apply & test analytical algorithms & statistc’l models. No trvl; no telcomm. Email resumes to: jgalin@graymatteranalytics.com.

HOUSE HELP WANTED

$600/Weekly. Working Days: Monday,Wednesday and Friday. Time Schedule: 10AM - 1PM. Email: johnlegend876@outlook.com

CLEANING COMPANY IS looking for a Quality Control and Sale position with good communication skills 773-558-0028

REAL ESTATE RENTALS

STUDIO $700-$899 LARGE ONE BEDROOM near

red line. 6822 N. Wayne. Available for sublease through 1/31/19. Hardwood floors. Pets OK. $845/month. Available 10/15. (773) 761-4318

LARGE TWO BEDROOM du-

plex near Warren Park. 1900 W Pratt. 2 full bathrooms. Heat included. Private storage. Cats OK. $1600/month. Available 11/1. (773) 761-4318

LARGE ONE BEDROOM near

red line. 6824 N. Wayne. Hardwood floors. Pets OK. $950/month. Heat included. Available 11/1. (773) 7614318

STUDIO $900 AND OVER

LARGE SUNNY ROOM w/fridge & microwave. Near Oak Park, Green Line & Buses. 24 hr Desk, Parking Lot $101/week & Up. (773)378-8888

MIDWAY AREA/63RD KEDZIE Deluxe Studio 1 & 2 BRs. All

modern oak floors, appliances, Security system, on site maint. clean & quiet, Nr. transp. From $445. 773582-1985 (espanol)

HOORAY FOR HALLOWEEN

PROMO! 1/2 MONTH FREE! GORGEOUS remodeled Kitchen in this extra large/ sunny 1 bdrm in beautiful English Tudor courtyard building! Stainless appliances, granite counters! Only 2 blocks from Irving Park “EL”! 4233 N. Hermitage: $1625 ht incl. NOV. 15 www.theschirmﬁrm.com (773) 381-0150

phin 1BR apts. Spac good trans, laundry on site, security camera. 312-341-1950

NO SECURITY DEPOSIT NO MOVE IN FEE 1, 2, 3 BEDROOM APTS (773) 874-1122

2 BR UNDER $900

AUSTIN - 5035 W. WEST END, 3BR, 2nd flr, recentely renov, quiet area, $1250/mo. $625 non refund move in fee. Sect 8 welc. 773-317-1837 CLEAN ROOM W/FRIDGE & micro, Near Oak Park, Food -4Less, Walmart, Walgreens, Buses & Metra, Laundry. $115/wk & up. 773-637-5957

69TH / CALIFORNIA 4 1/2 rms, 2BR, appliances, coin laundry, OH, near Holy cross hospital, $860 month + 1 1/2 months Sec Dep. O’Brien Family Realty. 773-5817883 Agent owned

76TH & PHILLIPS: Studio $600$625; 2BR, 1BA $825-$875; 79th & Woodlawn 1BR, 1BA $700-$725; Remodeled, Appliances available. FREE Heat. Call 312-286-5678 CHICAGO W. SIDE 3859 W Maypole Rehabbed studios, $450/ mo, Utilities not included. 773-6170329, 773-533-2900

BR $735, Includes Free heat & appliances & cooking gas. (708) 424-4216 Kalabich Mgmt 6930 S. SOUTH SHORE DRIVE Studios & 1BR, INCL. Heat, Elec, Cking gas & PARKING, $585-$925, Country Club Apts 773-752-2200

NEWLY REMOD Studios, 1 & 2BR starting at $580. No sec dep, move in fee or app fee. Free heat/hot water. 1155 W. 83rd St. 773-619-0204

1 BR $700-$799 FREE HEAT Chicago, 1140 E. 81st Pl. Brand new 1BR, ceilings fans, mini blinds, laundry room, parking, quiet area, appls incl. $725/mo. 312-915-0100

ALSIP: Updated 2BR apt, 1.5BA. $950/mo & 1BR apt, 1BA, $770/mo. Laundry, parking & storage. 708-268-3762 9147 S. ASHLAND. Large Studio $700, CLEAN, QUIET & SECURE, dine-in kitc, hrdwd flrs, appls, lndry. No Pets. 312-914-8967.

CHATHAM 708 East 81st (Langley), 3rd floor, 4 room, 1BR Apt, $700/mo + sec dep. Please Call Joe at 708-870-4801

1 BR $900-$1099 VICINITY GRAND & Ogden, 1BR PROMO! 1/2 MONTH FREE! EXTRA LARGE 2 1/2 rm RAVENSWOOD studio located 1 block from Metra, Marianos Grocery, LA Fitness! LANDLORD PAYS HEAT AND COOKING GAS! Pretty hdwd ﬂrs, tons of closets! Lndry/storage on-site. 4832 N. Wolcott $1,060. www.theschirmﬁrm.com (773) 381-0150.

73RD/INDIANA, 88TH & Dau-

7000 S. MERRILL: 2BR, hdwd flrs, lrg FR/snrm, new remod, cable ready, lndry, O’keefe Elem, $825/ mo. Section 8 welcome. 2219 E 87TH ST: 1BR, new bldg, across from Chicago Voc H.S., lndry, hdwd flrs, $725 incls gas, heat & prkg. 708-308-1509 or 773-4933500

7425 S. COLES - 1 BR $620, 2

HOORAY FOR HALLOWEEN

CHICAGO - BEVERLY, Studio, 1 & 2BR Apts. Carpet, Hdwd Flrs, A/C, laundry, near transportation, $690-$1040/mo. 773-233-4939

1 BR UNDER $700

BIG ROOM with stove, fridge, bath & nice wood floors. Near Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry, Shopping. $121/wk + up. 773-561-4970

PROMO! 1/2 MONTH FREE! HUGE RAVENSWOOD 2 1/2 RM STUDIO! STUNNING REMODELED KITCHEN! GRANITE COUNTERS/STAINLESS APPLIANCES! LOVELY HDWD FLRS, LOADS OF CLOSET SPACE! LANDLORD PAYS HEAT AND COOKING GAS! Lndry/storage on-site. $1,100. 4914 N. WOLCOTT www.theschirmﬁrm.com (773) 381-0150

CHICAGO, RENT TO OWN! Buy with no closing costs and get help with your credit. Call 708868-2422 or visit www.nhba.com

Ashland Hotel nice clean rms. 24 hr desk/maid/TV/laundry/air. Low rates daily/weekly/monthly. South Side. Call 773-376-5200

7022 S. SHORE DRIVE Impeccably Clean Highrise STUDIOS, 1 & 2 BEDROOMS Facing Lake & Park. Laundry & Security on Premises. Parking & Apts. Are Subject to Availability. TOWNHOUSE APARTMENTS 773-288-1030

SUNNY & LARGE 2 & 3BR, hd wd/ceramic flrs, appls, heat incl’d, Sect 8 OK. $900 plus. 70th & Sangamon/Peoria. 773456-6900 SUBURBS, RENT TO OW N! Buy with No closing costs and get help with your credit. Call 708868-2422 or visit www.nhba.com

CABLE & MAIDS. 1 Block to Orange Line 5300 S. Pulaski 773-581-1188

NICE ROOM w/stove, fridge & bath Near Aldi, Walgreens, Beach, Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry. $133/wk & up. 773-275-4442

HOORAY FOR HALLOWEEN

1 BR $1100 AND OVER

w/office. Nov 1st. Quiet, secure family building. Good light, good neighbors. NO Smoking. Cats allowed. Internet & cable included. $1085 + heat. 347-633-0005. No texts, please leave a message.

ONE BEDROOM APARTMENT. 1st floor. 5815 Fullerton, be-

tween Central & Austin. Available immediately. $900/mo includes heat, water and parking. Laundry inside building. 773-889-8491.

CHATHAM-LARGE 2BR, newly

OAK PARK HISTORIC District

Coach House: all hard wood ﬂoors; 15 windows, new kitchen & bath, inunit laundry, heated garage + extra space, 10 min walk to CTA Green Line (& restaurants, shopping, grocery, Starbucks), dog/cat – negotiable. PRIVATE-QUAINT-SAFE. Available 11/1/18. $1,700/mo + gas/ electric; 1 mnth deposit. Contact: kencozette@sbcglobal.net

1 BR OTHER APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. LTD. SUMMER IS HERE!!! MONST UNITS INCLUDE.. HEAT & HOT WATER STUDIOS FROM $495.00 1BDR FROM $545.00 2BDR FROM $745.00 3 BDR/2 FULL BATH FROM $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000** APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. LTD. SUMMER IS HERE!!! MONST UNITS INCLUDE.. HEAT & HOT WATER STUDIOS FROM $495.00 1BDR FROM $545.00 2BDR FROM $745.00 3 BDR/2 FULL BATH FROM $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000** APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. LTD. SUMMER IS HERE!!! HEAT, HW & CG PLENTY OF PARKING 1BDR FROM $785.00 2BDR FROM $1025.00 3 BDR/2 FULL BATH FROM $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000***

WICKER PARK, Apartment for rent, 4 rooms, sunny, hdwd floors, electronic security, great landscaping, 1 block to blue line, pets negotiable. $1200/mo. Call 773-772-8159, call/text 773-4307512 6748 CRANDON & 7727 COLFAX Most Beautiful Apartments! 1 & 2BR, $625 & Up. Off street parking. 773-947-8572 / 773-288-4444 SECTION 8 WELCOME. 8022 S. Maryland, 1BR, modern, appliances, off street parking, $625$980/mo. Call 773-618-2231

decor, separate DR, heat & appliances included, $1000 mo plus 1 mo sec call Linda 708323-8317 CHATHAM - 7105 S. CHAMPLAIN, 2BR. $750/MO. SECTION 8 OK. HEAT & APPLIANCES. CALL OFFICE: 773966-5275 OR 312-480-0436 72ND/FRANCISCO, newly remod, 3.5 lrg rms/1BR, carpeted, all utilities + cable incl. Smoke free. $875 + 1 mo sec. 773-719-2119

BRONZEVILLE - REMOD 1BR.

appliances & heat included. Call 847-533-5463.

SOUTHSIDE, Newly remod 2BR with appls & WD hkups. Enclosed back porch, finished basement. Call 773-908-8791

3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200

Chicago, Section 8 Welcome. 3BR Apt. 0-2 BR Vouchers also accepted. Near 119th & State. Utilities not incl. 773-416-7343

CHATHAM, 720 E. 81st St. Newly remodeled 1BR, 1BA, hardwood floors,

AUSTIN, 126 N. Long Ave., 3BR

ready now, $885. 5302 W. Hirsch, 1BR, ready now, $695. Move in fee req’d. 773-251-6652

SECTION 8 WELCOME. No Security Deposit. 7721 S Peoria, 3BR apt, appls incl. $1050/mo. 708-288-4510 117TH AND PRINCETON.

3BR. $750/mo. Tenant pays utils, No Dogslarge rooms, available now! 847-401-5800

ROBBINS 3 lrg bdrm, 2nd flr Apt for rent. Very quiet area, laundry rm, Senior Discount. $850 + utils. Section 8 accepted. 708-299-0055

3 BR OR MORE $1200-$1499

SECTION 8 WELCOME,

86th/Morgan $1200/mo + utils. 3BR, 1BA + 1 extra room, fenced yard. 773-456-2061

SECTION 8 WELCOME. NO SECURITY DEPOSIT. 1701 W 59th, 4BR, 2BA house, appliances included, $1300/mo. 708-288-4510 DOLTON Newly Renovated. 3BR, 1BA, fin bsmt, 2 car gar, Seniors Welcome. $1250/mo + 1.5 mo sec. No pets. 773-941-8254

3 BR OR MORE $1500-$1799 LARGE 3 BEDROOM, one bath

Hardwood floors. Cats OK. $1790/ month. Heat included. Available

MOVE RIGHT RICHTON PARK 3BR, 1.5BA T.H, Move-in Special, full fin bsmt, 1 car garage, hdwd flrs, SS Appls, loc friendly. $1600. 708-566-4101

floor, hardwood floors, enclosed porch, heat included. wash/dryer in unit, $1,300/mo. $40ea credit checks. Text/call 224.444.0099

ENGLEWOOD, 2 LARGE BR

CALUMET CITY 1st flr, hdwd flrs,

No Pets. 773-930-6045

3BR, DR, LR, 2BA, kitchen, bsmt, finished 6 rooms, 2 car garage. $1500/mo. 708-466-2443

3 BR OR MORE $1800-$2499 WRIGLEYVILLE: 1800SF 3BR, snrm, new kit. w/deck, yrd, oak flrs, lndry. $1895/htd. ONE MO. FREE. NO DEP. urbanequities.com 773-743-4141

1434 S. SPAULDING Ave.

Ogden/Kedzie. Newly Remod 2 & 3BR. $1000-$1300. Section 8 OK. David, 773-663-9488

EVANSTON: 1100SF 2 BR, new kit., SS appls., oak flrs, lndry. $12 50/htd. ONE MO. FREE. NO DEP. urbanequities.com 773-743-4141

2 BR $1100-$1299

3 BR OR MORE

WOODLAWN AREA: LARGE 1BR,newly decorated, hdwd flrs, LR, DR, laundry rm, appl, parking, heat incl, $625/mo + 1 mo sec. 312-841-4556 SECTION 8 WELCOME. NO SECURITY DEPOSIT. 718 W 81st St, 5BR, 2BA house, appls incl., $1300/mo. 708-288-4510

2 BR OTHER 1ST FLR APT. Avail. now, 7914-16 S. May St., Auburn Gresham, 2BR, living rm & family rm, kitchen, heat & water incl. 773-651-0711

RIVERDALE 145TH/LASALLE Cozy 5 rms, 2BR, 2BA, fireplace, 2

car garage, side drive, new air/heat/ windows, $45,000. 708-946-2745

MARKETPLACE

GOODS

CLASSICS WANTED ANY CLASSIC CARS IN ANY CONDITION. ’20S, ’30S, ’40S, ’50S, ’60S & ’70S. HOTRODS & EXOTICS! TOP DOLLAR PAID! COLLECTOR. CALL JAMES, 630-201-8122

RIVERDALE, 146TH ST.

Cozy 5 rm. 3BR, 1BA, 2.5 car gar, sec system. $1200/mo + utils. Sec Dep/ Credit check req’d. 708-946-2745

SECTION 8 WELCOME, 3BR 1BA, 2 car garage, remodeled, great home, great area. 117th & Bishop. $1475/mo. Al, 847-644-5195

CHATHAM Gorgeous, 2BR, 1st flr, updated kit & bath. $875/mo + utils & 1 mo sec. Clean & Quiet.

FOR SALE

SOUTHWEST AREAS furnished rooms with use of hsehld. $113-$125 per week, 1 wk security. 773-378-7763 or 773556-3230

11/1. Parking space available for $75/ month. (773)761-4318.

GLENWOOD, Updated large 2BR Condo, $990/mo. HF HS, balcony, C/A, appls, heat/water incl. 2 pkng, laundry. Call 708.268.3762

NEW KITCHENS & BATHS.

77th/Lowe, 2BR. 71st/Bennett. 2BR. 69th/Dante, 3BR. 77th/Essex. 3BR. Sec 8 Welc. 708-503-1366

roommates

East Chicago, IN 2BR $675 heat incl; tenant pays utils. 1 mo. free rent w/lease. Call Malcolm 773577-9361

apt, hdwd floors, sit in kitchen, 851 W 68th St. close to schools/ trans. $600 /mo + $900 security dep. 773-8581965

GENERAL

RIVERDALE - Remod 3BR, $13 00/mo + 1 mo. sec. Utilities not incl. Close to metra train station & Elementary school. 708541-0018

room apartment, 4423 N. Paulina.

CHICAGO- JEFFERSON PK 2BR, 1BA, 5028 W Lawrence, 1st

Great Neighborhood. Tier 1 School, Section 8 ok. Call 312-501-0509

SECTION 8 WELCOME Bright & airy, newly remod 3BR, sleek hdwd flrs, updated bath & kitchen, fin bsmt, SS appls, quiet. $1350/mo. 708-541-5524

SEC 8 OK! 4952 S. Prairie. $700 and up. Heat, cooking gas & appls incl, lndry on site. Z. 773.406.4841

2 BR $900-$1099

3-4 BEDROOM TOWNHOME,

OTHER

7109 S. EMERALD AVE., 5BR, 2BA, brick house w/ full LR & DR, hdwd flrs, newly decorated, ten pays heat. Sect 8 welc. $1500/mo + 1 mo sec. 773-457-7963 10234 S. CRANDON, small home, 3BR, 1BA, kit & util room, totally ren a/c, all appls incl, nice bkyrd. CHA welcome. 773-3174357

AUSTIN, 3BR, 1st floor of 2 flat, quiet neighborhood, near school & trans. Heat, appls & C/ A incl. Tenant pays elec. 708970-1441

RUMMAGE SALE ON Sunday,

October 21st from 9:00am to 2:00pm at Lincolnwood Jewish Congregation Beth Israel, 7117 N. Crawford, Lincolnwood.

GIANT ESTATE SALE-8749 W.

Wilson, Sat Oct 20, 8-4, Sun Oct 21, 9-3. 30s-70s. Furniture, lighting, dishes, jewelry, toys, holiday, more.

MUSIC & ARTS LOOKING FOR ACTORS, Dancers, musicians, singers, and writers. Need a first tenor that can do Eddie Kendricks, Please contact Sembene @ 773-783-7961 after 6pm

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for a young women for egg donation. Must be between the ages of 18-25, Caucasian, brown or black hair, and green, hazel or brown eyes. College educated or attending college, healthy, smoke and drug free, and a healthy BMI. You must be willing to travel to Naperville and Plainfield on multiple occasions. Please include a photographic with your application. We are not an agency. We are working with a reputable doctor, Dr. Randy Morris. Your health and confidentially will be respected. If you are willing to help us, please go to Dr. Morris donor website at www. ivf1match.com to complete the application and use reference code (fall2019). This is an anonymous donor program so please only contact the office of Dr. Morris. Donor compensation is $5,000 and will be given to the donor when the egg retrieval has been completed.

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SAVAGE LOVE

By Dan Savage

‘Help, I saw my employee at a Jacks club!’

Q : My husband and I are visiting Italy

Does this middle manager have to stop going? Plus: etiquette for bad pickups Q : I have a secret: For the past three

months, I’ve been attending a local Jacks club (a men-only masturbation event). As someone recovering from sexual abuse, I ﬁnd the party to be safe, therapeutic, and just sexy fun. I feel like I need this! Unfortunately, I spotted one of my employees at last week’s event. Although I’m openly gay at my workplace, being naked, erect, and sexual in the same room as my employee felt wrong. I freaked out, packed up, and departed without him seeing me (I hope). I’m his manager at work, and I feel that being sexual around him could damage our professional relationship. It could even have dangerous HR consequences. I realize he has every right to attend Jacks, but I wish he weren’t there. I want to continue attending Jacks, but what if he’s there again? Frankly, I’m terriﬁed to discuss the topic with him. Help! —JUST A

COCK KRAVING SAFETY

A : “I hate to say it, but now that JACKS

knows his employee attends these events, he really has to stop going,” said management consultant Alison Green, author of Ask a Manager: How to Navigate Clueless Colleagues, Lunch-Stealing Bosses, and the Rest of Your Life at Work. And why do you have to stop going to your beloved JO club? “In an employment relationship where he’s in a position of power,” said Green, “JACKS has a responsibility to avoid any remotely sexual situation with an employee.” Green also strongly advises against pulling your employee aside and working out some sort of shared custody agreement—you get Jacks to yourself every other week—because initiating a conversation with a subordinate about when and where he likes to jack off would be a bad idea. She also doesn’t think you can just keep going in the hopes that your employee won’t be back. “If he continues to attend and it got back to anyone at their workplace, it would be really damaging to his reputation—not the fact that he was at the event to begin with, but the fact that he continued to attend knowing an employee was also participating,” said Green. “It would call his professional judgment into question, and it’s highly likely that HR would freak out about the potential legal liability that arises when you have a manager and a subordinate in a sexual context together.” It seems crazy unfair to me that you should have to stop going to parties you not only enjoy, JACKS, but that have aided in your recovery. And Green agrees—it isn’t fair—but with great power (management) comes great

responsibility (avoiding places where your employees are known to jack off). “It’s never going to feel fair to have to drop out of a private, out-of-work activity just because of your job,” said Green. “I’m hoping it’s possible for JACKS to find a different club in a neighboring town. Or he could start his own club and offer a safe haven for other managers hiding out from potential run-ins with employees—Jacks for Middle Managers or something!” While I had Green’s attention, I asked her about other sorts of gay social events that might toss a manager and an employee into a sexual context—think of the thousands of men who attended the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco last month. Gay men (and others) walk around in various states of undress or dress-up, and a lot of flirting, groping, and more goes down. Should gay men in management have to skip events like Folsom lest they run into men they supervise? “Public events are different from private clubs,” said Green. “And it’s not reasonable or practical to expect managers to entirely curtail their social lives or never attend a public event. But a private club that’s organized specifically and primarily for sexual activity is in a different category.” I’m going to give myself the last word here: You’ve been attending that JO club for months and saw your employee there only once, JACKS, so I think you can risk going back at least one more time. I would hate to see you deprived of release if your employee was there only that one time.

right now. We decided to try out the local hospitality and have had two bad hookups. Both of us knew early on in the encounters that we weren’t enjoying it, but we didn’t know how to extricate ourselves. What is the proper way to end a failed hookup with minimum insult/hurt to the third person? —TEXANS SEEKING AMORE

A : 1. The unvarnished truth: “We’re sorry, but we aren’t really feeling it.” 2. The little white lie: “Oh, my goodness. I think the clams we ate earlier were off. I’m so sorry, we’re going to have to call it a night.” v Send letters to mail@savagelove.net. Download the Savage Lovecast every Tuesday at savagelovecast.com. m @fakedansavage

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OCTOBER 18, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 37

Sharon Van Etten é RYAN PFLUGER

NEW

Omar Apollo 12/7, 8 PM, Metro b Cannabis Corpse 12/10, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Dave East 12/7, 7:30 PM, Patio Theater Experience Hendrix 3/22, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 10/19, 10 AM b Art Garfunkel 12/14, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 10/18, noon b Ggoolldd 12/19, 9:30 PM, Sleeping Village Freddie Gibbs 11/16, 7 PM, Park West b Macy Gray 12/28, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 10/18, noon b Half Alive 1/30, 7:30 PM, Schubas b The Head & the Heart, Mt. Joy 12/6, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 10/19, 9 AM b Brendan Kelly 12/1, 8 PM, Sleeping Village Jodee Lewis & Jonas Friddle 1/20, 7 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 10/18, noon b Kathy Mattea 1/13, 7 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b New Kids on the Block, Salt-NPepa, Tiﬀany 6/14-15, 8 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont b Tom Odell 4/30, 7:30 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 10/19, 10 AM b The Oh Hellos 12/12, 7:30 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 10/19, 10 AM b Paris Combo 1/17, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 10/18, noon b Radar State 2/2, 8 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+ Ripe 1/31, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 10/19, 10 AM, 18+

Space Jesus 12/31, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Esperanza Spalding 12/5, 8 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 10/19, 10 AM Three Women & the Truth 1/11, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 10/18, noon b Sharon Van Etten 2/14, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 10/19, 10 AM, 17+ Adia Victoria 2/25, 8 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 10/19, 10 AM, 18+ What So Not 12/30, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Fri 10/19, 10 AM, 18+ Anita Wilson 2/10, 7 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 10/18, noon b

UPDATED Every Avenue 12/27-28, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 12/28 sold out, second show added, 17+

UPCOMING Acid Dad 11/2, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Alcest, Cloakroom 10/31, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ All Time Low 12/21, 7:30 PM, House of Blues b Lily Allen 10/31, 7:30 PM, the Vic b Amigo the Devil 11/2, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen Atreyu, Memphis May Fire 12/2, 7 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Iggy Azalea 11/17, 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom b Ballroom Thieves 10/27, 9 PM, Schubas Bas 2/10, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge b Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys 11/2, 9 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn

38 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 18, 2018

Suzy Bogguss 12/2, 7 PM, City Winery b Brand X 12/8, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Buke & Gase 11/3, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Anna Burch, Fred Thomas 10/26, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Circa Survive, La Dispute 11/3, 7:30 PM, the Vic b Kweku Collins, Joseph Chilliams 10/26, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall b Cult Leader 11/30, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Cupcakke 11/10, 9 PM, Thalia Hall b Cursive 11/15, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Dawes 1/29, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Death From Above, Les Butcherettes 11/16, 8:30 PM, Metro b El Ten Eleven 11/10, 9 PM, Chop Shop, 18+ Roky Erickson 11/9, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall Exploded View 11/1, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Father 11/2, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 18+ Felly, Gyyps 12/1, 6:30 PM, Patio Theater Oliver Francis 12/7, 10 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Get Up Kids, Remember Sports 11/10, 9 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Ghost 11/1, 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom b Ghostmane 10/28, 7 PM, Lincoln Hall b Helio Sequence 11/28, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Jade Cicada, Detox Unit 11/16, 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Jawbreaker, Naked Raygun, Smoking Popes 11/4, 6:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom b Jay Rock 11/11, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+

b Elle King, Cordovas 11/10, 7:30 PM, the Vic b King’s X 12/9, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Klingande 10/28, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Kodaline 11/27, 6:30 PM, House of Blues b John Legend 12/13, 7 PM, Lyric Opera House Lemon Twigs 1/25, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Longleash 11/11, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Macabre 12/22, 6:30 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Matisyahu 10/28-30, 8 PM, City Winery b Maxwell 12/2, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre Mewithoutyou 11/30, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Misﬁts, Fear, Venom Inc. 4/27, 7:30 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont Municipal Waste, High on Fire 11/15, 7 PM, Metro, 18+ Nothing, Nowhere; Wicca Phase Springs Eternal 12/19, 6 PM, Bottom Lounge b Paper Kites 11/21, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Parquet Courts 12/3, 7:30 PM, the Vic, 18+ Phish 10/26-28, 7:30 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont Preoccupations, Protomartyr 12/6, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Procol Harum 2/20-21, 8 PM, City Winery b Regrettes 11/30, 7 PM, Subterranean b R.Lum.R 11/5, 7 PM, Lincoln Hall b Russian Circles, Bongripper 11/23, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ (Sandy) Alex G 11/4, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Travis Scott, Trippie Redd 12/6, 7:30 PM, United Center The Sea & Cake 11/17, 7 PM, Empty Bottle Slackers 11/30-12/2, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Snail Mail 1/17, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Snails 12/7, 9 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 18+ Stars 12/5, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Surfbort 10/29, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle F Teenage Fanclub 3/6, 7:30 PM, Metro, 18+ This Will Destroy You 11/2, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Carrie Underwood 10/29, 7 PM, United Center Valley Maker 12/14, 9 PM, Hideout Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons 11/3, 8 PM, Auditorium Theatre Veil of Maya 12/21, 6:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Kurt Vile & the Violators 12/22, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Bozo Vreco 10/27, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Rufus Wainwright 11/20, 8 PM, the Vic

ALL AGES

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

EARLY WARNINGS

CHICAGO SHOWS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IN THE WEEKS TO COME

Never miss a show again. Sign up for the newsletter at chicagoreader. com/early

Ryley Walker 12/28, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Weepies 12/9, 7 PM, Park West b Bob Weir & the Wolf Bros 10/31-11/1, 7 PM, Chicago Theatre William Elliott Whitmore 12/13, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Why? 11/3, 9 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Wild Nothing 11/9, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Keller Williams 11/9, 9 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Keller Williams Duo 11/8, 8 PM, City Winery b Windhand, Satan’s Satyrs, Genocide Pact 11/7, 9 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Danny Worsnop 11/18, 5:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Wrecks 11/20, 7 PM, Lincoln Hall b Yellow Days 11/12, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Young Fathers 11/19, 9 PM, Bottom Lounge, 18+

SOLD OUT Cavetown 12/8, 6:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Billie Eilish 10/28, 7 PM, Metro b Every Time I Die, Turnstile 11/12, 6 PM, Metro b Laura Jane Grace & the Devouring Mothers 11/8, 8 PM, Hideout Conan Gray 11/13, 7 PM, Schubas b Greta Van Fleet 12/12, 7 PM and 12/14-15, 8 PM, Aragon Ballroom b Jim James, Alynda Segarra 11/9, 7:30 PM, the Vic b Lake Street Dive 10/27, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Lany 11/1, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b Max, Bryce Vine 10/31, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge b Mitski, Jessica Lee Mayﬁeld 10/25, 7:30 PM, the Vic b Andy Shauf 11/29-30, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Tenacious D 11/13-14, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Violent Femmes 11/4, 7:30 PM, the Vic, 18+ Jack White 11/19, 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 17+ Lucinda Williams 11/17, 8 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn, Oak Park River Forest Food Pantry Beneﬁt Thom Yorke 12/4, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre v

GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene LAST NOVEMBER, Gossip Wolf halfjokingly referred to the pleasantly dank lo-fi electronica of local singer and beat maker Jenny Polus—then performing as Spa Moans, now as Jenny Pulse—as “rain-forest wave.” It wasn’t intended as a dis, though Polus says she’s “spent two years trying to figure out how to not be called a lo-fi musician anymore.” On her new album, Marmalade (out Friday, October 26, via New York label Drop Medium), Polus has moved out from under the ferns and into the club—her solid, effortlesssounding jams touch on acid house, electro, and disco. “While tape sound still inspires me,” Polus says, “all of these songs are intended to be ‘pop hits.’” This wolf thinks the glistening beats, smooth hooks, and layers of sensuous, breathy vocals on dreamy jams such as “Living Room” could fill a city block’s worth of dance floors! On Monday, October 22, Polus celebrates at the Empty Bottle on a bill with Gel Set, Proﬂigate, and Z. Soniat. A few years ago, Chicago rapper Calid Bowen, aka Calid B, started the collective AfroBang, whose members aim to celebrate their connections to Africa and uplift the diaspora. Calid’s father is from Cote d’Ivoire, and Calid learned how to play the djembe long before he began experimenting with hip-hop production in college. A couple months ago he dropped the irresistible AfroBang 2: Son of Sogolon, which blends Afropop, trap, funk, and R&B. On Thursday, October 18, Calid B headlines Bourbon on Division, with openers Lulu Be and Jay Swifa and DJ sets by Skoli and Bonita Appleblunt; it’s $10 and kicks oﬀ at 8 PM. On Saturday, October 20, all-woman Tokyo punk trio Tsushimamire headline a free show at Cole’s in Logan Square! They’ve been making gnarly, pop-forward songs since 1999, and they’re traveling the States to support their latest mini album, August’s Night and Morning. Vamos and Luke Henry open; the show starts at 9:30 PM. —J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or e-mail gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

OCTOBER 18, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 39

SPECIAL GUESTS

VUNDABAR / BIG EYES THIS SATURDAY! OCTOBER 20 VIC THEATRE THIS FRIDAY! OCTOBER 19 PARK WEST

THIS SUNDAY! OCTOBER 21 VIC THEATRE

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 PARK WEST

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26 RIVIERA THEATRE

OCTOBER 30 PARK WEST

SPECIAL GUESTS SPECIAL GUEST

OCTOBER 31 VIC THEATRE

MADDIE ROSS

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 1 PARK WEST

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 3 VIC THEATRE

DECEMBER 5 • VIC THEATRE ON SALE THIS FRIDAY AT 10AM!

BUY TICKETS AT